At the Broken Places
by T.S. Blue
Summary: "I'll make it right, Bo," he whispers, though he knows that's not possible anymore. "I'll fix it." Bo's broken in more pieces than Humpty Dumpty, Jesse and Daisy's hearts are broken, while Luke's broken away from the family to take matters into his own hands. Canon divergence, alternate take on Carnival of Thrills. Rated T to be on the safe side. Complete.
1. Sedated

_**Author's Note:** (It might just be true that I like _Carnival of Thrills_ a bit too much. This is exhibit… D? in the prosecution's case.)_

_This one started out as: what if Bo had attempted the Leap for Life stunt on his own, and what if he had failed? It got turned over in my mind a half a hundred times, and bounced off of Mirthless Laughter and HazzardHusker (thanks to you both for your patience) a half a hundred more until it settled into this: _

_What if the carnival went to Hazzard before it went to Cedar City? What if the sequence of those two shows was reversed, so the Dukes never saw another driver crash while attempting the stunt? How would that change the way the plot line proceeded? _

_The answer that came through this story seemed to be, some things stayed exactly the same, but a lot of them changed. Luke was still opposed to Bo doing the jump, but he didn't get the support of the rest of the family in trying to talk him out of it. Zimbra did show up, but he did not enter the story line at the usual place because this was only the third attempt to complete the jump, not the fourth. Luke and Bo did not make up (heck, Luke wasn't even in the right place to be made up with) and Bo attempted the jump on his own, impaired General and all._

_And that's where our story picks up, so I'll stop blabbering and leave it to tell itself from here…_

* * *

**"_The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."  
— Ernest Hemingway_**

**1. Sedated**

Roar and rumble, vibrating from his toes to his helmet, adrenalin coursing through until every part of him wants to take flight, heart quickening to match the rhythm of the General's engine. Breath trying to stay slow and steady but suddenly shallow as he sees that slender thumb come up in the distance through the curve of the windshield, and she's beautiful when the wind blows her hair into a halo around her face. But there's no room for those kinds of distracting thoughts, so he clears his mind and reaches a hand out the window into the bright-hot sunshine, and lifts his own thumb to mirror hers.

Just him (and the butterflies swooping across his belly) in the car, nothing to hear but the growl of the engine as he presses his foot down on the accelerator but doesn't let up on the clutch, not yet. One more, deep, steadying breath of air that tastes of exhaust and grease, does more to sicken him than settle him down. Focusing on the ramp, black and white with its centerline red arrow, feeling his body and the General's engine become one again. Relaxing because this is easy, this is nothing at all, he can jump higher and farther than he's being asked to now. Hell, he's the best driver in three counties and—

Right foot down, left foot up and the wind gusts through his open windows like the bass drum at a Fourth of July parade, trees and cars on either side of him moving too fast to think about, red arrow the only thing that matters now. Fingers tight around the steering wheel, growl and snarl, gust and blow and sputter (sputter?), zebra stripes and the memory of Diane's kisses, the promise of more, clank and rattle, momentum changing as he starts to ascend, soon he'll be flying, (sputter? hesitation?) pale blue of the sky with thin clouds whiter than Boss Hogg's coat, restraints tight around his body, (sputter? cough? wheeze—) smell of gasoline, too-late-now, lift and float, tipping too soon, heat and smoke, the scream of bending metal, impact, ouch-ouch-ouch, flame (flame?) and heat, not-looking, not-looking, but the pavement's got to be coming up to meet him and the General awfully quick. A terrible rending cry that might be him or might be the General and there's nothing to see anyway. The smoke's too thick. (Smoke?)

"Is he all right?" Diane's voice in a near shriek carrying through the PA system over the tinkle of breaking glass, and, "Bo! Bo! Bo!" a lot closer, not amplified. "Release your restraints." Real or just a memory, an instruction learned by rote?

Screaming, like the engine of an airplane, hiss and it's like trying to breathe in quicksand. His lungs hurt, his chest, his hand and ow-ow-ow everything else, but he thinks he has managed to unbuckle his restraints.

"Are you okay?"

"Can you hear me?"

"Can you move?"

A cacophony coming at him too thick and fast to answer. Hard to know what he is, where he is, what he can do when his head's ringing and everything is the smell of burning and gasoline, and this is what it's like to die—

"Bo," one voice, louder than all the rest, and yet somehow gentle. Kinder than it's been in days, not calling him an idiot or insinuating nasty things about his girlfriend. "You're going to be all right." Luke, close and safe and strong. "It's going to be okay."

Just that and he knows it's all right now to let go and let the darkness close in and overtake him.

* * *

Damn the Carnival of Thrills for coming to Hazzard, damn Diane Benson for her predatory ways, damn Bo for being so easily swayed—

(No, not that last one. There's no room for that anymore.)

_You need to count ten_, Jesse always used to tell him. _You need to control yourself, you need to take a step back._

Maybe he hadn't understood it as a ten-year-old who didn't know his own strength. Didn't know about anything except wounded pride and his own misery, the unjustness of a world that left him without mother, father or brother, that let a little brat like Hughie Hogg have both money and parents and still be a miserable wretch. Took a lot of years and a few nasty drill instructors to set him straight on all of that.

He's got to take a step back from the twitchers and criers, from the pacers and from Jesse and Daisy who have been doing a little bit of all those things and are now sitting in the brightly colored and oddly shaped, hard-plastic chairs. Luke's arms folded across his chest and trying to look away from the waves of anxiety that roll through the large room like an endless ocean of freshly shed tears. He wonders, as he looks up at the round clock that he'd swear is broken or at least running very slow, where the new fathers are, whether they keep the families expecting good news away from those that have brought in kin that's broken, bleeding, unconscious.

(Enough of that.)

Tri-County never has been much of a hospital, heck, he saw field hospitals erected next to rice paddies that were more substantial. Still, it could play the game better, could look a lot less like a children's playroom with thick orange carpet and mustard-yellow walls, nurse's desks in shades of rust and brown. White is a perfectly reasonable color for a medical waiting room, clean and antiseptic and at least then he wouldn't have to worry about what manner of germs are lurking in the yellow drapes that don't quite match the walls, just waiting to infect Bo, to get into his wounds and—

God, he'd looked awful. Blood from his leg, white of bone jutting through ragged skin. Ashen and breathing shallowly like something inside of him hurt even through the veils of unconsciousness. Parts of him at strange angles to other parts and the paramedics had been efficient if not exactly kind. They'd resisted Luke's presence, both as they loaded Bo onto the stretcher and as they'd tried to close the ambulance doors with him on the outside, but he'd been immovable, solid and insistent, which had gotten him a ride to the hospital alongside Bo. Not that it had mattered. His cousin was out, stayed out from the moment Luke and one of the carnival's crewmen pulled him from the cockpit of the still-smoking General, right up until he was driven up to the glass doors of the emergency room, unheard sirens whistling overhead, then wheeled through and right on past the limits of where Luke could go. A trio of security guards managed what the paramedics before them had failed to do, and Bo got taken into the depths of the hospital, where Luke couldn't follow.

(He should have been in the car with Bo. Bo shouldn't ever have been in the car at all.)

His hands had gone up in surrender, keeping him from being thrown out of the hospital altogether, and the most sympathetic of the security guards had pointed a gruff finger at the admittance desk, turning Luke loose on the unsuspecting workers there. Two women, each looking as prim and defenseless as the next, but they'd held their ground well enough, insisting that they couldn't even talk to him until he'd filled out this form and that one and ten others besides. _Over there, sir, not standing in front of our desk._

Somewhere along the line, Jesse and Daisy had made it here. Could have been five minutes after Luke was handed the forms, or five hours. (Probably a lot closer to the former; they would have had to find the jeep and get disentangled from the traffic of carnival-goers disappointedly heading home, but they wouldn't have wasted any time getting here.) Jesse had asked him what was happening, gotten a shrug of an answer and handed the clipboards of blank forms. He'd glowered at Luke and set to work filling them out. Daisy had gripped Luke's arm, dropped her head onto his chest and started to cry. He might have patted her back once or twice out of a lifetime habit, but he can't swear now that he actually comforted her any. Consolation and kindness came later, when Cooter showed up and took her into his arms.

Jesse's been up to the desk a few times since, asking for updates (and getting none), but otherwise there's been a whole lot of nothing but ugly walls to look at, ugly thoughts to think.

Eventually Doc Petticord moseys out through the doors – the man is old, but it seems to Luke like he could move faster all the same – and makes a beeline for Jesse. Luke moves to intercept, as though he can spare his uncle the knowledge of Bo's condition. Hell, Jesse's an old man with a tricky heart, and Luke knows what Bo looked like when he was pulled from the wreckage of the General, when he was wheeled in here after the ambulance ride. The blood, the strange angles of his body, the ashen face, the damned eyes that wouldn't open or even move under the lids. The man who raised Bo as his own doesn't need to know about all of that.

But Jesse's pretty spry for an old guy and Luke had been standing too far behind his kin to make up the ground, so they all meet in the middle for this little conference. Doc Petticord, who does weekly shifts here at the hospital (and it shouldn't be such a shock to see him), kind of ushers him and Jesse toward a quiet corner, and this gives Daisy time to join them, too. Great, the girl will be sobbing at the first word to come out of the Doc's mouth.

Then again, she manages to be quiet and attentive as the doctor, whose body seems far too frail to manage the enormity of Bo's injuries, explains one broken part of their cousin after another. It's Luke whose ears and brain aren't quite in sync with one another as his own thoughts intermingle with the Doc's words.

Introchanteric-fracture-to-the-femur (lifetime of pain), pair-of-subtrochanteric-fractures (wheelchair), internal-bleeding, threat-of-pulmonary-embolism (oh, God), compound-fracture-of-the-tibia (so much blood), surgery-possible-now-that-he's-stabilized, with-your-permission-of-course (invasion leads to infection), sternal-bruising (heart and lungs under fragile ribs), Bennett-fracture-to-left-thumb (won't even be able to propel himself in that wheelchair), concussion-bruising-helmet-saved-him (for what? A lifetime of misery and pain?). You-can-see-him-before-surgery (_yes_ and _no_ screaming simultaneously in his brain – the urge to see that he's alive competing with the dread of seeing, all over again, just how badly banged up he is), one-at-a-time-for-a-minute-or-two-each (standard procedure when the patient is considered too weak to handle a whole lot of stimulation).

"I'll just wait here," Cooter says, and it's only then that Luke notices that he's been hovering on the fringes of this ghastly discussion about everything that's wrong with Bo.

Jesse nods at him vaguely like it's a great idea instead of a necessity when Bo's bad enough off that only immediate family is allowed to see him anyway. "I'll go first," their uncle says, and he sounds almost as shaky as Luke feels.

Maybe he should offer some form of comfort to the man who has loved Bo since he was a screaming, red-faced infant. Except Luke's pretty sure he doesn't have any to give.

The old man trundles off in his best overalls, the ones he usually wears to church but broke out a day early so he could go to the Hazzard Fairgrounds and watch his nephew become a local star. At least that was the plan and Daisy put on a pretty dress, too.

"You go see him next," he urges Daisy as soon as Jesse's out of sight. He'd like to say he's being chivalrous, but he kind of reckons that what he's feeling is closer to cowardice.

Somewhere in those days between that joke of a road race that the carnival set up to scout a new stunt driver and the day of the carnival, someone got the Dukes three tickets to sit in the stands and watch Bo jump those thirty-two cars. Luke was so busy being angry and trying to drill sense into Bo that he didn't pay attention to whether those tickets were bought by Daisy or sent by Bo and the carnival.

Daisy looks up at him, wet-eyed, and it's only now that he realizes that those were probably the first words he's spoken to her since this morning. Back when Bo was still whole, still an idiot that Luke was mad at, back when he was refusing to attend the carnival with his kin.

It was a damn-fool stunt, he'd been saying that since the notion of it got introduced back on Tuesday morning and his mind hadn't changed about that any. He sure as hell wasn't going to just sit in the stands (even if they did have VIP tickets near the front) and watch the jump happen. Jesse barked at him to quit acting like a sore-headed brat but in the end, there was nothing the old man could do about his refusal to go to the fairgrounds with the rest of his family. They'd fixed their hair and smoothed their clothes and then Jesse and Daisy had walked out the front door. After that there was nothing but the fading echo of Dixie's motor as they drove away.

Jesse comes back down the mustard-yellow hallway, looking at Luke and nodding, like he's releasing him to go next. Raises one white eyebrow when Daisy takes a step forward first, wraps one arm around those heavy shoulders, buries her head in the folds of his neck, then lets him go to take her own trip down the hall.

"How is he?" Luke asks, even if he doesn't want to know. Even if he already knows far too much.

"Sedated," Jesse answers him quietly. Cautiously, testing Luke's waters to see if they're boiling or ice cold, and either can kill a man that's fool enough to submerge himself in them. "I appreciate," Jesse says and it's rough around the edges in the way that his uncle used to be when they were all a lot younger. Back when he seemed big and immovable, then Lavinia died and he became this other thing for a while. Tired, old, easily provoked to emotion and that's what he sounds like now. Like death has snuck up behind him and stolen another member of his family right out from under his watchful eyes. "That you was there when he needed you."

But he wasn't, and that's the thing. He'd known he couldn't be a spectator to the jump; that much had been clear in his head from the moment he'd understood that he wasn't going to be able to talk Bo out of attempting it. And some part of him had been reciting the mantra of letting the fool learn his lesson the hard way, but he hadn't meant it – at least that's what he's been telling himself when he's not obsessing about the blood, the brokenness, the damned idiocy—

(No, too late for that.)

Luke folds his arms across his chest, like he can protect himself with that little, like his brain will take the hint and stop thinking, but it's just like Bo. It won't shut up no matter how many times he tells it to.

"Luke," Jesse says, but he must know it's fruitless; he quits right there.

The idiocy, both his and Bo's. He knew that, after Jesse and Daisy left. Knew it and knew he'd been avoiding it all along. Knew that Bo wouldn't listen to him, especially not if he kept pointing out exactly how unlikely the whole scenario was – unlikely that Diane really loved him, unlikely that he could succeed at the jump when there was something wrong with the setup of a carnival looking for a last-minute stunt driver – but there were things Bo wouldn't do, even as angry as he was. So Luke had jumped into Jesse's pickup, checked his watch and tried to time himself perfectly.

The pickup – with him in it – was going to have to be the kind of deterrent that Luke's words hadn't managed to be. Bo would yell at him, he'd punch him in the face, sure, but he wouldn't deliberately ram him with the General (and even if he was mad enough at Luke to consider it, he'd never hit the pickup for fear of Jesse's wrath and a tanned hide) just to get his way. A last minute blockade, but it would take good timing to get it right – if Luke came through the access road onto the fairgrounds too early, Bo would spot him and have him removed. And if he arrived too late…

"Looks like it's your turn," Jesse finally says in some sort of acknowledgement that he started a sentence that never got finished.

"Yes, sir," he mumbles. He'd swear there are rocks tied to his legs, but he manages to lift one, then the other and somehow plods forward. Passes by Daisy as she returns to the safety of their uncle's arms. He tries not to look at her, fails, sees the tears that he already knows are going to be streaking her cheeks. Boulders chained to his legs and the carpet is so thick that it wants to swallow him up, but one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, he marches like the young Marine he once was. Going towards what a smart man would run from.

He arrived at the fairgrounds too late, that's the long and short of it. Or the carnival ran early – Bo was supposed to jump at one and Luke was sure it was still a few minutes before the hour when he skidded through the opening in the chain link fence, sliding over loose dirt as he turned toward the runway and the ramp that had been built in the middle of the arena. Saw an orange flash in front of him, the zero-one on the side of the car he and his cousin had built together blurring with movement until it was more of a big, black, gaping stripe racing from the edge of the fairgrounds toward the middle. Screamed Bo's name though he knew he'd never be heard, found traction for the pickup's tires and rumbled in the general direction of the ramp. Squinted through the dust and grit and glare on the windshield, saw the General climb, hesitate, lose some of its engine power but careen off the end of the ramp anyway. Burst into flames and by then Luke was running, no idea where he'd left the pickup, if it was still running, maybe in gear, but that wasn't important. All that mattered was getting to Bo, getting him free of the flames and twisted metal, getting him to safety.

And here Bo lies on something rigid that's a cross between a bed and a gurney. Doesn't look terribly comfortable, but Jesse's right – Bo's sedated beyond the pain, beyond response to words or touch or anything at all, beyond the point where he looks alive.

"The rod will stabilize that thigh bone," Doc Petticord informs him from where he's checking Bo's IV flow next to the bed-gurney. "Then we can set the—"

Luke lifts a hand to make him stop talking, and the old doctor nods his grizzled head in acknowledgement of what Luke doesn't quite say. "I'll leave you alone for a minute," he says. "But only that long. Then we've got to get to work."

Luke nods and looks away from the frailty of Doc's body, from the hair that he doesn't even see fit to comb and how can this man operate on Bo when he can hardly take care of his own basic needs?

(_Don't, _his Aunt Lavinia nags inside his head_. Go judging a man by his dungarees. Dirty and ragged just means he's hard-working, clean and tidy means he's getting ready to visit the house of the Lord. One's as good as the other._)

"Bo," he mumbles when the squeak of Doc's shoes disappears into the hallway. Takes the last few steps toward his cousin (entire mountains bolted to his legs, but at least there's nothing but tile on the floor in here), reaches out a hand like he means to touch him. Stops himself, his cousin is broken in far too many places for touching to be wise. "I'm sorry," he adds. For talking too much and listening too little, for hitting Bo back when his cousin was already hurting enough to hit him first, for letting him leave home without chasing after him, for not stopping the jump in time. For failing him in every way possible.

Through the blur of wetness in his eyes, Luke can see the faint bowed smudge of lipstick on Bo's cheek. Daisy kissed him there, doesn't seem to have done him any harm. Luke's fingers trace the spot. Cool skin, smooth, soft. Too easy to bruise so he backs away, breaks contact.

"I'll make it right, Bo," he whispers, though he knows that's not possible anymore. "I'll fix it."

He turns on his heel, walks out of the room. Turns right instead of left at the door, walks away from the waiting room where Jesse and Daisy are probably sitting, telling each other it'll be okay when of course it won't. It never can be. Makes his way down the length of the ugly hallway, pushes through the emergency door. No alarm sounds when the glass door swings open in front of him, so he just keeps on going until he's out in the back edge of the parking lot where there are only one or two cars and otherwise nothingness in front of him.

* * *

No-no-no-no-no…

"There he is," swims down at him from somewhere, but no. There he's not, there he doesn't want to be.

Pain. Everywhere at once, but mostly when he breathes. If only he could not breathe, but then holding onto his breath hurts worse and besides, he lacks the concentration or energy to remember not to breathe. About all he can do is exist as quietly as possible.

"Bo? Bo? Open your eyes, boy."

No, not now. Maybe later, maybe when enough time has gone by that the pain has passed or at least lessened. When his head doesn't throb and his heart doesn't beat too hard against his ribs. When those thoughts that are trying to find themselves in his head are nothing more important than the insistent droning in the gaps between the voices. When he doesn't have to worry about what it means that his nose is filled with the smell of ammonia and bleach.

"Daisy, get the doc."

No-no-no-no-no-no. Because the pain is bad, it's awful. But it's not the reason he's been fighting against consciousness, not when there's been this other thing underneath it all. This sense that something very, very bad has happened, that he's lost more than he can bear to comprehend.

"Bo?"

He's moaning. He just realizes this and yet he's known it all along. Those sounds between his uncle's pleas for him to open his eyes, to wake up and come back to them, have been his own groans and whimpers. He's hurt worse than he ever has been before. The General's hurt; he knows that, too. He can feel it all happening again, the loss of power, the hesitation. He can see it, too, the blue sky overhead, knowing that he's got a longer jump to complete than he has momentum for. Knowing he's going to fail, seeing that blue sky turn into shiny metal below him, the ground below that, brown dirt. He can feel the heat, hear the screams.

"Luke—"

Luke's voice telling him he was going to be all right.

"There he is, he's coming around now." That's Jesse.

"Can you open your eyes, Bo?" comes that other voice, thin and worn with age. Doc Petticord.

No, opening his eyes would mean giving up the relative safety of sleep, or at least rest. The comfort of darkness, where he is not hurt and hospitalized, the General is not dead, where he hasn't disappointed all of Hazzard, where he hasn't let down—

"Diane?" he mumbles.

"Oh, sweetie," that's Daisy, a squeeze of his right hand in fingers so narrow yet strong that they've got to be hers. The hands of a farm girl.

"Open your eyes, Bo," Doc Petticord commands, and disobeying isn't getting him anywhere at this point. His memories are unwinding like a ball of yarn rolling down a hill. There's no stopping them now, as they unspool to the end. "That's good," the doc informs him when he gives in and does as he's been told. Leans close and there's the mixed smells of wood smoke and liverwurst as the narrow frame of the doctor fills the whole of his vision. Staring into his eyes, shining a light at him so brightly that Bo closes his eyes against the invasion. "Keep them open," comes the instruction, not mean but firm. Doc Petticord never has tolerated nonsense and like Uncle Jesse, he's one of the elders in the community that has license to threaten to whip anyone of any age who sasses or otherwise defies him.

"Luke," he moans again as he opens his eyes. That's the last of it – the series of memories he doesn't want to have ends with Luke's voice telling him it'll be all right.

Doc and his blinding light back up half a step. "What's your name, boy?" the old-timer snaps. Has that sound to it like the doc's asked this question before and gotten an unsatisfactory answer. Like any minute now he's going to be sent to stand in the corner and he's pretty sure he can't even sit up. Can't even be sure that he's in a room with corners to begin with. (But definitely hospital. Something, somewhere is beeping and there's the hushed sound of voices in the distance.)

"Bo," he answers back, the sound thick and heavy in his own ears. "Regard. Duke," he adds when the doc hesitates like he's waiting for more.

"What's today's date?"

"September 13, 1980?" he guesses. At least that's the last date he remembers it being. The nod from Doc Petticord seems to confirm his accuracy. Which means he can't have been sleeping for as long as it seems. Still Saturday and it's been a long one. Far too long and he'd just as soon go back to sleep now and wake up whenever all of his parts stop hurting.

"And where do you live?"

Well. That's a tough one. Up until a couple of days ago he lived with his uncle and two cousins in the farmhouse he grew up in. Since then he's kind of floated around the Hazzard Fairgrounds, mostly sleeping in Diane's recreational vehicle, but with one of his own to retreat to, if he needed private space.

He tries to decide what the right answer might be, looks over the doc's shoulder to see Jesse nodding at him. The farm it is, then.

"Old Mill Road," he says, hearing his voice slur sloppily over the words. "In Hazzard."

"Good job, boy," the old doc says, patting his hand. Funny, he can't remember Daisy letting go of it, but it's definitely the doctor's dry palm touching him now. "We'll want to keep a very close eye on him through the night," Petticord tells Jesse. Or Daisy, Bo can't be sure, but he's smart enough to know it's not him that's being spoken to. He closes his eyes. Hears words like concussion, traction, rehabilitation. Metal rod (oh, Lord) for stability, going to take time. "Are you listening to me, boy?" comes through loud and clear. Bo opens his eyes long enough to shrug. Or try to, anyway, there's a pull and pain in his left arm when he does it. More pain shoots up his arm when he tries to lift that hand so he quits. Besides, he got a good enough look by tipping his head. White cast from his elbow to his fingers. There's that annoying sound again – his own moans. He closes his eyes.

"I reckon he's had enough for now," Jesse asserts on his behalf. If he could move, he'd hug the man in gratitude.

"You may be right, Jesse," the doctor agrees. A number of thanks are uttered, along with goodbyes and see-you-soons. Bo doesn't pay too much attention through that part, just lets himself float on the sound of the voices as they drift away across the room. Jesse's, the doc's, Daisy's – he wonders, idly, where Diane is and figures that she's been kept out by hospital rules. Only immediate family, which means that Cooter can't visit him either. Just Jesse, Daisy and Luke.

"Luke?" he says, though he knows Luke's not here. He's just too tired to form it into the full question, _where's Luke?_

"Luke'll be here later," Jesse assures him from very close. Must be sitting right next to his ear. Or standing, hard to know when he didn't ever take a look around the room to see if there was a chair. Oh, well, he can get around to figuring exactly where he is and what's really wrong with him later. "You just get some rest."


	2. Notes in the Dust

**2. Notes in the Dust**

There's dust on his boots, his jeans, in his hair and stuck to his face with sweat. Probably dust in his teeth, too, and with every gust of the evening's breeze, more of it tries to find its way into his eyes and nose. The late summer heat has been working at him every step of this journey, leaving him exhausted and a bit shaky. Or maybe it's that other thing working at him – Bo in broken pieces in the hospital. Alive, but he'll never be the same again. Not when it's going to require surgery to halfway put him back together again.

Luke's thumb is safely in his pocket now, though it's been out plenty along the way and he's gotten pretty lucky to string together rides here and there to make up the miles between the hospital and here. Now that he's down to his last half mile or so, he might as well walk the rest, sweat sticking his shirt to his back and his hair to his forehead. Gives him more time to think.

About the things he can't change and the things he can. The past is too far gone to fix, every stupid word said and mean punch thrown leading down the path that was neatly laid out by Diane Benson, splitting the Duke family and leaving Bo unprotected and vulnerable. That part's written in stone and no amount of wanting to unwrite it is going to accomplish the task. Bo's bones aren't going to get unbroken through any feat of wishing.

But someone's responsible for this mess, beyond just him and Bo acting like posturing idiots and fighting each other. Sure, Luke had a bad feeling about that stupid-fool stunt jump from the start. (_Thirty-two parked cars?_ Daisy had asked when Diane Benson had announced what the real prize was for winning a child-easy road race. _Will they be side-by-side or end to end?_ And though Luke had been rolling his own eyes at the question, he'd wanted to smack Diane for her little giggle. Even if she was a woman, even if the only infraction he'd been able to accuse her of at the time was insulting Daisy's intelligence.) Bo is the best driver in three counties – heck, three states, probably – and on his better days Luke's been willing to admit that. Just quietly, inside of his own brain because saying it out loud would do far too much for Bo's ego and far too little for his sanity. He _should_ have, under the right circumstances, been able to safely pull off the jump, as stupid as it was.

Which means that the circumstances were wrong, and how did they get that way? Was it poor engineering, design or workmanship on the part of the fly-by-night carnival that built the ramp and placed it where they did? Or was it something more deliberate and sinister than that? Either way, the problem started and ended at the Hazzard Fairgrounds, and after about five hundred yards and a bend in the road, and Luke will be there.

His primary mission, he keeps telling himself, is to retrieve Jesse's pickup. Daisy's Dixie is in the Tri-County Hospital lot; Luke saw it there when he trotted from the back door to the trees along the border of the lot. (Ought to be ashamed for disappearing without telling his family he was leaving, except that even he didn't know he was going until he found himself outside.) The pickup wasn't anywhere to be seen on the hospital premises, or he would have taken it and left the jeep for his kin. Jesse and Daisy must have driven together to the hospital, which means that the pickup ought to be right where he saw it last, abandoned next to the Leap for Life ramp.

And he's just going to get it so he can have some wheels. He is not – no matter how much he might want to – going to the fairgrounds to deck Diane Benson for her manipulative ways. It would be wrong to hit a woman, no matter how sneaky or selfish or downright dangerous she is, no matter how much she deserves it.

But if, while he's there just recovering his own family's property, the opportunity should arise to question Diane about just what she thought she was doing by putting his cousin at risk like that, well, Luke's going to do it. And he's not going to feel guilty if he raises his voice in the process, either, even if she does cringe and call him a brute.

But when he makes it to that bend in the road, he forgets all his inner promises to behave, forgets how hot and tired and just plain wretched he feels and starts to run at full tilt for the fairgrounds. There's no sign of the pickup anywhere he can see, and he can see a lot. The whole grounds, actually, because almost everything is gone. No more RVs, no more hoops of fire or crash barrels, no piles of junkers, not even the one Bo crashed into this afternoon. Nothing more than the remnants of a ramp or two, and a few show cars and motorcycles strewn about like unloved toys. No movement other than the crows that are making a feast of spilled popcorn and hotdog buns, and a small clump of men standing around the half-dismantled ramp that the General careened off of only hours ago.

"Hey!" he hollers, hopping over the fence instead of entering through the gate like a good boy. Oh, well, there are no tickets to buy to the aftermath of a disaster. "What are you doing?"

Three guys, that's all he sees. One of them turns to look at him, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the lazy rays of the setting sun. The others turn more slowly, and see his approach as a reason to quit working for now. They're nothing but drones, he realizes as he keeps trotting toward them all the same. Workers for the queen bee, and they're only doing what they're told.

"You supposed to be here?" asks the one with his hand up and he might be saluting Luke, if his form wasn't so sloppy. "Carl send you?" There's no urgency in the voice, no sign of fight in the man's stance or his tone. And much as Luke would like to pound the tar out of someone, this guy bears him no ill will and wouldn't swing first.

"No," he admits, trotting the last few steps so he can be even with the guy. "I ain't with the carnival. I got other business here with Ms. Benson. Can you tell me where she's at?"

"Nope," the guy says, dropping his hand now that Luke's shadow covers his face. He's not a tall man, but he's built solidly and it's clear that hard work suits him. Luke finds himself halfway wishing that the guy would take a disliking to him so they could fight. He'd be a pretty fair opponent. "I can't rightly do that, since I don't know. She and Carl and most the rest of the fellows always pack what they can and leave the day the carnival closes to go scouting for our next fairgrounds. They'll send someone back to tell us where to go. I figured maybe you was the one they sent, even if it is awfully early for them to have found a new place. Usually it takes a couple days."

"Dave," one of the other men says, the one with the ropy muscles and the flowery tattoo running up and down his left arm. He twirls his wrench in his hand like a toy, but he's dextrous about it. The guy is good with tools, no two ways about it. "If he ain't here to tell us nothing, I reckon we'd best get back to work."

The ramp is about half gone now. The plywood from the top half has already been removed and is piled on the asphalt a few yards to Luke's left. The scaffolding that held it up is mostly dismantled and lies in pieces all around, except for the middle support, which is what the guys must have been taking apart when Luke showed up.

"Reckon so," Dave agrees. "Sorry I can't help you find Diane," he offers.

"Why's she got you taking this all down already?" Luke asks, and while the other two guys go back to work on the metal frame, Dave stashes his wrench in his back pocket and puts his hands on his hips. He's plenty friendly enough, as long as Luke's willing to keep giving him an excuse to take a break from serious labor.

Luke's not feeling half as friendly, really. This right here is a crime scene, as far as he's concerned, and ought to have been investigated properly. But Rosco and Enos aren't here to preserve its integrity, and it's not Dave's fault that he's the one that's got orders to unpreserve it.

"We always got to find a new fairgrounds quick," Dave informs him with a casual shrug, utterly ignoring the grumbled complaints behind him from the two other workers who really could use his help right about now. One of them, heavyset one, gives Luke a hard look, like maybe he's not too happy about this interloper that's interfering with their progress at this task. Well, Luke's not too happy, either. But he nods and smiles for Dave anyway, silently urging him to go on. "Don't never do more than hardly break even with each show we do. Once we pay for the rental of the grounds and the insurance and all, we're just about as broke at the end as we were in the beginning. Got to keep moving around to make a big enough name to land the state fair circuit. Then we'd be making money. Bring in twice the customers with state endorsement." If there were a chair anywhere, Dave's backside would be finding its way into it right now. The remnant military man in Luke wants to snap at him to do his fair share of the job at hand, but the rest of him appreciates Dave's loquacity and lack of concern about what he's really supposed to be doing. "Still, we did good on this show. We could probably afford a week off. Sold more tickets to these yokels than anywhere else we've ever stopped."

"Dave," the heavyset guy growls. Sounds mean and though Dave's been above-average helpful up until now, Luke can't swear he'd be sad if one of the other guys hit him for his laziness. "We can't do this without you."

"Oh, sure, right. Coming," Dave agrees, with the slow-moving laziness of a foreman that's not at all bothered by letting his subordinates do all the heavy lifting. "Anyways," he adds to Luke, "you just keep an eye out for notices and you'll figure out where we are next. We don't never seem to move too far between one show and the next. We're sure to be around somewhere near and maybe for this next show, we'll actually find someone who can complete the Leap for Life. We do that and we'll make the state circuit for sure, Diane says."

It's a good thing that Dave's made himself a habit of ignoring other people's emotions, or he might notice that Luke's jaw has tightened down and his eyes have narrowed enough that it's like peering through slits.

"Does that mean," he forces himself to say, instead of teaching Dave the lesson he wants to. "Other guys have crashed doing the Leap for Life?"

"Every one of them," Dave answers back with a casual smile that proves he has no idea how close he's coming to getting decked. "Every town we go to, Diane's got to find herself a local hot-rodder that'll jump for her. And ain't a single one can actually do it, though the one we had this week looked really good. Don't figure there's any reason he shouldn't have made it."

"Do the cars always burst into flames like that one did? Before it even landed into the pile of other cars?" Because that's what happened, and that's why Luke can objectively know that this right here is a crime scene, and not just because Bo's the best driver he's ever known. But because cars don't just spontaneously burn like that.

Dave scratches his big, dumb old head. Meanwhile, the heavyset worker behind him is moving out from under the half-dismantled ramp to get closer to this conversation. Or to grab Dave by the arm and pull him back to working. "Most of them, I reckon. They're usually carnival cars, and I know they ain't never been drivable after a wreck. This guy used his own car."

Yeah, Luke knows that. He wonders how long it took Cooter to yank the General out of here after the crash. Seems like he got to the hospital awfully quickly, but there's no way the mechanic would have left the General behind, any more than Luke would have left Bo behind.

"Anything funny about the ramp?" Luke asks.

"Mister," the heavyset guy interrupts. "There ain't nothing wrong with this ramp. We're union workers," he informs Luke. And seems to be reminding Dave of that fact at the same time. "We got standards to adhere to, and we do it every time. Besides, that driver that crashed today, he walked that ramp maybe twenty times just to check it out and he didn't never find no problems with it."

Luke nods and lifts his hands to show that there was no harm meant, because as much as a fistfight might make him feel a little better about the way Dave hasn't shown Bo a whole lot of respect, he reckons he actually ought to thank these guys. They've been very free with their information. "Much obliged," he offers by way of making peace.

"Ain't you got somewhere else to be, mister?" the heavyset one hints. Dave seems to be in charge here, but this guy's the muscle.

"As a matter of fact, I do. I come back looking for my pickup truck." It was, after all, his original mission. "Y'all ain't seen it around, have you?" Because like the majority of the carnival equipment, it's nowhere to be found.

"The local law towed away anything that wasn't ours and was still on the premises an hour after the carnival closed," says the muscle to dismiss him. "I reckon you'd best go look for it in the impound yard."

Of course that's what Boss had Rosco do. Luke's a fool for having assumed that the fairgrounds would be crawling with law enforcement pulled from all the surrounding counties to investigate the crime that has obviously taken place here. The excuse for Hazzard law would rather figure out how to make money impounding cars than do any real work.

"Much obliged," he says again. Waves goodbye so they'll go back to work, turns and walks away. Not far, not yet. First he checks what had been the runway to the ramp, the place where the General was last seen on all fours. Looking for telltale spills or stains, but there's no way to tell what marks have been there for days and which might have been there for weeks, since the last time it rained in these parts.

So he wanders out the access road. Doesn't move particularly quickly, not when he's got a long walk ahead of him and already-tired feet.

* * *

His hip hurts. There under the surface of whatever amount of sleep he's trying to get, there's that throb like a heartbeat in his hip that won't let up. It occurs to him to roll over and find a more comfortable position in the bed, but the effort makes him cry out.

And then he's awake.

"Bo." Daisy, close to his ear and comforting like the mother he can't remember having. "Sweetheart, take it easy."

He breathes in slowly, waits a while before opening his eyes. He knows that where he is and where he was just dreaming of being are two different places, but that doesn't mean he's ready to see it.

He's spent plenty of time in the Tri-County medical facility since that first time when he was a tyke with a fishhook where no fishhook ought to be, and he's never made it past the emergency room before. Luke always complains that it's an ugly place with its yellows and oranges instead of plain white, but Bo's just figured it was nice that whoever decorated the place tried to make it look a little prettier than most hospitals. Still, when he opens his eyes to find yellow tile climbing halfway up the wall before it meets plain white paint, his first thought isn't how happy he is to be here in this brightly colored room.

Once again he considers rolling over onto his right side to reduce the pressure on his left hip, but he doesn't even get as far as trying before he thinks better of it. His left leg is covered in plaster from his hip to his knee, where what supports him becomes less of a cast and more like some sort of futuristic metal splint that makes him wonder how much of him is still flesh and how much is metal now. The whole contraption is hooked up to a cable that stretches up to a frame over the bed, keeping his leg up off the mattress at maybe a twenty-five degree angle.

Traction. That's what Doc Petticord said last time he was awake.

"What else is wrong with me?" It's just supposed to be a question. But he hurts everywhere from his head to his ankle, so he doesn't worry too much when it comes out as more of a whine.

Daisy's fingers graze against his cheek. "Doc says you'll be good as new in no time," she offers instead of an answer.

Good as new, heck, how can a man that's covered in plaster – his left arm's encased, too, he notices all over again – and is all but hanging from the ceiling ever be good as new again? His breath catches in his throat (his chest hurts, too and his head) and Daisy pats at his cheek again.

"But what's wrong with me?" he asks, more quietly this time, because it hurts to breathe deeply and speak loudly.

"Sugar," Daisy soothes, looking back over her shoulder like maybe she hopes there'll be a better answer over there instead whatever the true one is that's in her head. Like maybe there are words on the wall that will prompt her into saying something encouraging. She sits in a chair that's pulled up next to the right side of his bed. He hadn't noticed it there until now, but then again, his eyes have mostly been focused on the various ways that his body seems to be just about mummified. (It's not that bad. It's not, it can't be.) "Where does it hurt?"

As if listing all of his sore spots is going to help either of them at all at this point. Daisy's the squeamish sort. If she knows all of what's wrong with him (and she might not, she might have been shielded from that part) she doesn't want to say.

"Where's Luke?" Luke'll be honest with him. Maybe too honest. "Where's Jesse?" His voice squeaks at the end.

"Jesse had to see to the livestock." Daisy's hand threads through the hair at his forehead, her thin fingers cool to the touch like always. The hospital is air conditioned, unlike any other building in the county. Neither he nor his lightweight cousin is used to the unnatural chill. "And the chores. He should be back before too much longer. Cooter was here yesterday and Boss and Rosco came by last night," ah, so it's morning then. He should probably ask whether it's Sunday or Monday, but he realizes it's not important. As long as he's stung up like a slaughtered pig, it doesn't matter what day it is. He's not going anywhere. "But they wasn't allowed in here to see you." Because, of course, he's bad enough off to be restricted to visitors from the immediate family only.

"What about Diane?" She's got to be fraught with worry. Not only is her boyfriend hurt, but it happened in the middle of him working for her carnival. He can only imagine how he'd feel if everything was reversed and he wasn't able to see her. "They keeping her out, too?"

"I reckon," Daisy says, but not to him. To the wall over his head. He cranes his neck to look up there, but doesn't see anything so fascinating that her eyes should be fixed there.

"Where's Luke?" he asks again. He's not going to get any straight answers from Daisy, and if what he's going to get from Luke is going to be a lot more like blunt (infused with a dozen or more I-told-you-sos about his failure to complete the Leap for Life) at least it'll be honest.

"I'm sure he'll be here later," Daisy says, still not looking at him. Now she's fiddling with something to his right. A wire, looks like. Next to the tubing that snakes down from a bag on a pole overhead, and it's only now that he notices the needle in the crook of his right arm. Great, he's strung up to an IV as well as being in traction. He looks away from that, away from whatever Daisy's doing. Maybe the truth is more than he wants to know after all. "You know how he is when one of us gets hurt." Yeah, Luke doesn't take it too well when something bad happens to his younger cousins, and that not taking it well usually means someone gets punched. But Luke would never hurt Diane, even if he can't stand her, even if he blames her for what happened. (Oh, God, he needs to get up out of this bed or he needs to get either Luke or Diane here, quick. Maybe both of them, if they can stand to be in the same place together without tearing each other apart. He's going to have to broker some sort of peace between them so they don't go off making each other miserable while Bo's stuck in here, wired to all the fixed parts of the room.)

"Let's get the nurse in here," Daisy says and he hears a beep in the hallway. Must be a call button that she was fiddling with. "I was supposed to let them know when you woke up."

* * *

_No excuse, no excuse, no excuse_ – the words are doing laps in his head and he's not even sure what he means by them. The blue sedan he stole from Cooter (borrowed, hotwired, and there's never been a time when the mechanic hasn't readily lent what he has to serve the greater purpose of one of Luke's plans) is parked in exactly the same spot he found it in the alleyway behind the garage, with only a missing gallon of gas to tell the tale. He has managed to sneak through the back entrance to his own farm (or Uncle Jesse's, but he will inherit it someday, so it might as well be his) to find no one home, shooed the chickens into their coop, fed them, milked the cow and had himself a quick breakfast, all before the sun rose. No harm has come to anyone (yet) at his hand, and still he's sitting here with those words running through his head like a mantra. _No excuse_.

He didn't so much break into the garage last night as let himself in through the second story window. It had been no real surprise to him to find no one at the county building when he'd made his slow way back to town from the fairgrounds, getting there after the street lights had been burning for hours. The Busy Bee Café had been closed too, and even if it had been open, Luke didn't have but about two dollars in his pocket. So he'd pulled himself up the drainpipe that hangs on the side of the theater, walked his way across a few roofs, and dropped to the top of one-story portion of the garage. No windows needed to be broken, he just jiggled until he found one he could open and slip inside. His intentions were no loftier than to get some rest, then figure out what to do next.

But no sooner was he inside than he was assaulted by the telltale smell of brunt rubber and melted plastic. The General, because of course Cooter had collected him, and of course he'd towed him here, then locked him up relatively safely inside before heading off to the hospital.

He'd jumped down from the loft to the garage floor without bothering with the ladder, to find the second-worst sight of the day. Bo's still, pale and bleeding body had been worse, but this was bad. So very bad. Crumpled fenders were old news, broken axles weren't pretty, but he'd seen them before. But the blackened paint, the crookedly gaping hood exposing burnt housing of wires and rubber hoses melted to the charred engine, the fluids boiled and blackened and left to leak everywhere – it was too little and too much all at once. He'd pulled a work light over and clipped it to a nearby post, unsure whether the bent hood would hold it, and taken a closer look. Messy as a well-charred bowl of beef stew – all the component parts were in there, melted and burnt together until they were unrecognizable.

His eyes, nose and throat had burned – he'd told himself it was the smell – as he'd pulled off the driver's side front panel and taken it over to the wall. Found himself a mallet and began to pound it back into shape. The rest would wait, it would have to. It was too dim and his eyes were too blurry to see anyway, whether there was any real evidence left under the hood of what had gone wrong, why the General hadn't given Bo enough power to sail cleanly over that pile of wrecked cars. So he beat on the car's outer skin, because it was the only thing it was safe to take the terrible day out on. Found stale doughnuts on Cooter's workbench, leftovers from the morning no doubt, since he and Bo hadn't joined their friend for their usual Saturday morning breakfast. Crunchy now like doughnuts never ought to be, but they were food, so he'd eaten a couple.

Hours later he'd finally crawled back up to the loft and gotten a fitful hour or two of sleep before he'd woken to that litany – _no excuse, no excuse, no excuse_ – bouncing around his head. He figured it was about the chores, how they hadn't been done before he fell asleep, so he'd gone and done what he should have, eight hours late, but two hours before sunrise. Grabbed himself a quick breakfast of toast and jam, which wasn't much, but it was probably better for him than last night's donuts. One hand sneaking behind the water heater to find the cigar box hidden there and pull out fifty dollars in cash – just one fifth of what Bo had left with Jesse three days before as a down payment on his half of the General. Luke hadn't wanted the money, Jesse hadn't figured it would stay in the family for any amount of time – how long could his nephews feud anyway? – so it had gotten put away until the two of them came to their senses. Luke pocketed the fifty with the thought that now they'd never get a chance to come to their senses, but the money would be useful anyway, and then he'd sneaked out the door as quietly as he'd come in.

Now his tired slits of eyes are staring out the smudged window of Cooter's loft, waiting for any action at all around the courthouse. It's Sunday, sure, but someone's got to come on duty soon. _No excuse, no excuse, no excuse_ – he's got to get the pickup unimpounded, and then he's got to get to work, and the damned lazy law of the land is taking its sweet time—

Damn it. There's Rosco, slinking in his scared-cat way up the marble staircase to the front door. Fiddling with his keys and that means it's his turn to work Sunday morning, and Enos' turn to go to church. And it also means that he can kiss the whole fifty dollars in his pocket goodbye. Enos would be reasonable – Rosco's going to charge Luke whatever price Boss has seen fit to set on the impoundment fee.

Oh, well. _No excuse, no excuse, no excuse._ He's got to head over to the courthouse and negotiate himself some real wheels if he's ever going to chase down Diane Benson and figure out what the hell she did to Bo or to the General to cause his crash.

He climbs down the ladder, heads toward the garage doors. Stops, turns back. Walks up to what might be jokingly called Cooter's desk, but is more of a place to store papers and wanton grease stains.

He uses his index finger to block print_ How's Bo?_ into the fine coating of dust that covers the wood. Then he goes back to the door, shoves it open, and walks out into the gloomy morning.


	3. Grand Theft Canival

**3. Grand Theft Carnival**

He hesitates – as much as a man cresting the threshold of consciousness can – because this waking up thing hasn't been going all that well for him lately. Last time he was awake Daisy summoned a nurse, who came in and efficiently read his charts, efficiently checked his blood pressure, efficiently poked at the IV in the crook of his elbow, and efficiently stabbed his upper arm with a needle. Antibiotics in the IV to prevent infection, she explained, meperidine to lessen his pain in the needle. Made him grateful, if only for a moment, that his hip was encased in plaster so she couldn't stab him there.

His injuries were efficiently laid out for him then, even as his eyes began to droop. Four breaks in his left leg, three above the knee (one in his hip and two in his thigh bone) which is why he's in traction. One below the knee that broke through the skin, which is why he'll be on infection-preventing antibiotics for a while, and until they're sure of him, his lower leg will be splinted, but not in a cast. Broken left thumb, which is also in traction inside of the spica cast he's wearing, bruising everywhere, but particularly on his chest where the restraints caught him, minor burns here and there, and a concussion. Though, she'd pronounced, shining a light into his eyes, that last part at least was getting better.

She had that look about her, like she'd been pretty once, like she hadn't always been quite so efficient and direct. He smiled for her, even if he was far too tired to flirt.

"Now," she'd said, not smiling back, exactly, but not quite so serious, either. "You sleep and later on Doc Petticord will be here to see you. He'll give you all the proper names for your injuries and when he does I expect you to act surprised, like I haven't already broken protocol by telling you."

Yes, ma'am. He'd meant to say it, might even have tried, he can't swear now. If anything came out, it was probably a mumbled mess, because the next thing he remembers is dreams. Swirling and swimming, dizzying, but they always came back to Diane begging him to help her, followed by Luke yelling at him that he was a fool.

And now he's waking up and maybe it shouldn't be a prospect worse than those dreams, but then again, waking up hasn't been working out well for him lately.

Voices, that's what's pulling him to consciousness. Talking about him, about the crash and the carnival and one of those voices belongs to Jesse. That's what coaxes him to consciousness – the urge to see his uncle's face, to hear the old man's encouraging words and feel those wrinkled old hands patting his face.

"Jes—" is as much as he manages before the man leaves the quiet conversation at the foot of the bed and walks around Bo's upraised leg to get a good look at his face.

"There's my boy," Jesse mumbles roughly. As expected, his old man's scarred knuckles come to graze against Bo's cheek. "How you feeling, boy?"

Kind of like he crashed his car into a pile of thirty-two other cars, honestly.

But now that he knows that the pain in his chest is just from bruising and that the heartbeat in his leg is down to a dull roar, he's feeling somewhat better.

"Good," he says, tries a smile on his uncle, turns to offer it to Daisy, too. The girl steps forward to approach his right side and grab onto his good hand. On the way, her bare shoulder brushes against Enos Strate's, making the poor deputy blush up wild-raspberry pink.

Enos. Must mean that he's allowed visitors from outside of the family. Which is a good thing, though he can't quite remember why he's so pleased to realize it.

"Hi, sugar," Daisy says, kissing his cheek on the opposite side from where Jesse's fingers are still brushing against his skin.

"What day is it?" he asks. Sleeping might be more pleasant than being awake lately, but he's about tired of being drugged and fuzzy-headed. Time passing and him not knowing how much, people in his room and he doesn't know whose visits he's been sleeping through.

"Still Sunday, sugar."

Well, that's good, at least. He hasn't been out that long.

"Hi, Enos," he says, realizing he's been remiss in not greeting all his guests. Though peering past the deputy, he can't see any others. "Ain't y'all supposed to be in church?" He looks up at Jesse to see that he's getting scoffed at.

"I reckon we been doing plenty of praying for the last day," the old man scolds. "Church was hours ago, but we was here with you. You had us scared, boy."

"I'm sorry," he offers. Sincerely feels sorry, looking at the wrinkles around Jesse's eyes and the shine just below them. Old, Jesse's been old to him all his life. But even when Maudine's colic has kept him up for two nights in a row, the bags under his eyes haven't ever been that dark or heavy. Heck, even Luke's two years in the Marines didn't seem to take as much of a toll on his uncle as the past two days have. "Where's Luke?" follows as a natural consequence. Usually when he's apologizing to his uncle for worrying him, Luke's standing close enough to his shoulder to feel his heat.

"Luke did the chores back home this morning," Jesse explains. Funny how he looks at about that same spot on the wall that Daisy was so interested in earlier. Bo tips his head again to look at it, but he can't see anything and the pull of the contraption on his leg is painful, so he quits. Daisy pats his hand when he settles back onto the bed with a quiet grunt.

"I thought you done the chores this morning." That was where he was supposed to have been earlier, when Bo was left unprotected with Daisy, who saw fit to call in a nurse bearing pointy objects and looking for soft skin in which to stick them.

"Well, I did," Jesse tells him, his voice up in that wheedling range. Hand on his face again, rough and warm and smelling of soap. Maybe getting ready to put itself over Bo's mouth so he'll stop being so disagreeable. "We both did the chores this morning."

"What did he say? Is he coming here or—" Oh, right, that's why it's good that he can have people outside the family visit him. Diane will be allowed in now. "He ain't headed over to the carnival, is he?" Because there's no doubt in Bo's mind that his cousin blames Diane for this. Heck, Luke blamed Diane before it even happened, went after her verbally like he never has any other woman, even the ones that broke his heart. The crash couldn't have helped his attitude any. And while Bo doesn't know how the crash happened, he knows with all his heart that it was not Diane's fault.

"Don't rightly see how he could be, Bo," Enos says, sound of that ever-present, innocent grin in his voice. "Since the carnival left town yesterday afternoon."

What? "What?" _What?_ "What do you mean left town?"

"Well, they started packing up their equipment maybe a half hour after you left in the ambulance, Bo." There's that nervous giggle, the one that shows up right before Enos tries to keep a barroom brawl from erupting between two feuding families that are madder than a swarm of yellow jackets and long past drunk besides. The one that realizes, just seconds too late, that Enos' face is in jeopardy of getting badly bruised. "And when I asked, Mr. Price," that would be Carl, "said they had to go find them a new site for their next show. And then he said they had to find something else, but I didn't hear what it was because Ms. Benson kind of yelled at him and then told me she'd pay Mr. Hogg for the rental on the fairgrounds on her way out of town." If Enos had been wearing his hat, it would be in his hands now, the tassels getting twittered in his fingers. But he must've taken it off when he came into the hospital, or maybe before he got out of his cruiser, because it's nowhere Bo can see it. "I'm sure she'll let you know where she is," Enos mumbles. "Once she knows where she is," kind of trails off at the end like Enos isn't sure what he's saying anymore. And that makes at least two of them.

"You color's looking better, sugar," Daisy informs him, and that's real good news. Nice to know his cheeks are flushed to a healthy pink when his leg's broken into more pieces than he can count, his chest's bruised enough that he can't take a deep breath without pain, and oh yeah, his girl's somewhere between here and no one knows where. But it sure is nice about his coloring and all.

"Enos," Jesse says, but he's looking at Bo. Probably watching how his nice, healthy pink cheeks are going purple right about now. "Ain't you supposed to be on patrol?"

The deputy hem-haws and otherwise stumbles around something of an answer. Hard to say whether it's a yes or a no, but Jesse doesn't even try to interpret it.

"Well, then, best you go. Daisy'll walk you out." _And don't let the door hit you on your fanny, either. _

"I will?" his girl cousin asks. "I will," she corrects herself after meeting Jesse's eye. "Come on, Enos, we got to get going."

"Yes, ma'am," Enos says, his eyes brightening out of the confusion and worry they'd found themselves in just moments ago. "It sure was nice to see you, Bo. You get well soon, you hear?"

Yeah, he hears. But the apparatus that's got hold of his leg doesn't seem like it's going to let him go anytime in the near future, so he reckons it'll be awhile before he's well again.

"Uncle Jesse," he says as soon as Daisy and Enos are safely out the door. There's more to follow, complaints about things he can't change, questions about things he doesn't know, but one held up hand stops him.

"Now, Bo, don't you go worrying about Diane. I reckon she's got things to tend to, and I reckon she's tending to them now. All you got to worry about is being still and not getting too excited. You just concentrate on healing." Sounds wise, sounds like the kind of advice he ought to listen to.

"What about Luke?" he complains.

"Don't you go worrying about Luke, neither," sounds dark, sounds like the threat of a whipping.

* * *

It's a bad day, one with very little hope of being logical, when he has to admit that Rosco P. Coltrane has made a reasonable point. Bad day, no sign of it getting better.

The drizzle starts on his short walk from Cooter's garage to the courthouse. The crops and gardens in the whole northwestern corner of the state have been waiting thirstily for a good soaking, but today's rain won't provide it. Just the sort of mist that hangs heavily in Luke's hair and makes his shirt stick to his shoulders, almost as fine as a layer of sweat, and just about as welcome, too.

Stepping into the courthouse is about as much of a pleasure it always has been, smell of red tape and bureaucracy hovering in the air with just a touch of jailhouse-threat mixed in. Walking through those doors voluntarily is always a fool's game of roulette, but it has to be played.

Rosco's surprised to see him, if not exactly pleased.

"Rosco, how come you was so busy impounding cars yesterday instead of investigating that crime scene over on the fairgrounds?" Especially when Luke doesn't bother with how-de-dos and launches straight into the heart of the matter.

"Ijit!" is about the best explanation the sheriff can provide on such short notice. "Crime scene," he mumbles. "That wasn't no crime scene. That was a mess, that's what that was."

Rosco's hat's not yet off, he hasn't started the morning coffee or even sat down to his desk to take his first snooze. He can be forgiven for not thinking terribly clearly, Luke decides. Things have to be carefully spelled out to him on a good day; the tired way he rubs his eyes goes to prove that today's prospects are anything but good.

"You know," Luke points out to him, strolling up to plop himself on the railing that runs between the desks and the walkway. "Just about as well as I do, that Bo Duke ain't never crashed on a jump a day in his life. You'd know even better if you could ever keep up with us, or stay out of the pond. So busy swimming with your car you can't see how good he is."

"I can't swim," Rosco reminds him quietly, without the slightest hint of a stutter. "And I'm sorry he got hurt," sounds like sincerity. Maybe a little too close to pity for Luke's liking. "But you said it yourself, all week long. Only a fool would try that jump. I heard you say it to him with my own ears, when you was both in my own jail cells." Rosco's hat comes off; his hair's a bird's nest of browns and grays. No comb has touched it this morning and it looks like the bed was not kind to him. Lumpy and cruel, poking at him from all sides. Luke knows that kind of bed; he tried to settle into one just like it last night. "I reckon you was right." So quiet, so serious, like he's reciting Bo's eulogy, like it matters half as much to him that Bo was hurt as it does to Luke.

"I wasn't right," _damn it_, he wants to add, catches himself just in time. Got to be civil, at least for now. Yelling at Rosco won't get him anywhere useful and there's still a small chance that he'll get the pickup out of impound for a reasonable price. "Somebody done something to that ramp or to the runway or to the General Lee. Ain't no way Bo would have crashed otherwise."

Rosco shakes his head, drops his hat on the desk and heads for the cold, empty coffeepot in the corner. Turns on the burner before filling the reservoir up top, and that right there is a recipe for a scorched pot.

"He checked all them things before the carnival started," Rosco informs him. "I was there, because Boss was watching over that whole carnival like a hawk. Them two, Ms. Benson and Mr. Price, they rented it with a promissory note, you know." No, he hadn't known, not exactly. He'd been somewhat aware that Boss was far too interested in keeping Bo from making the jump, but he hadn't thought too hard about why. He'd just accepted that it was useful that for once, he and Boss actually agreed about something. "Well, Boss was hoping they wouldn't be able to pay the three thousand, seven hundred ninety-seven dollars and fifty three cents," recited like Rosco's heard it a hundred times, and he probably has, "for rent of the fairgrounds, so he was counting on you stopping Bo from making that jump." Great, everyone with a stake in the matter was standing by for Luke to come to the rescue and there he was, late to the damned party. "Anyways, before the carnival got going, Bo walked the runway and the ramp, and he checked on the General Lee. Wasn't nothing wrong with none of them or he wouldn't have tried that jump."

"Had to be something wrong," Luke insists, "with something."

Rosco reaches for the glass coffeepot, draws his fingers back quickly. Must have gotten hot already. He pops off the switch that controls the burner and sticks his fingers into his mouth.

"Luke Duke," he mumbles around his mouthful. Yanks his fingers out of the way and makes a slight spitting noise, like they tasted that bad. "Best you move along now. I know you're upset about your cousin," upset doesn't scratch the surface of how he feels. "But Boss is gonna be here soon and he ain't going to be too kindly disposed toward you. Best you and your accusing tongue get lost before he hears you talking about crime scenes and decides to throw you in jail for grand theft carnival." Rosco's eyes meet his and hold there for maybe the first time since he was an out-of-control teenager that was about to get a night in the slammer in lieu of the spanking that he really needed. Tired eyes, edged in loose flaps of skin that tell the tale of Rosco's age, but they're alert. Somewhere under those slumped shoulders, there's still a spine. "He'd do it, too."

"All right, Rosco," Luke says, standing up off the rail, putting his hands up in surrender. He knows a gift when he's being given one. "I reckon I'll go. Once you spring Jesse's pickup from the impound for me."

"I can do that," Rosco says, like he's surprised that he can accomplish anything at all. Maybe he is. "If you give me thirteen dollars right now," he adds with a tight little grin that expects Luke to kick the furniture and complain of injustice, then plead with him to let it go for free. He grabs for the coffeepot again, maybe with intent to go downstairs to the washroom and fill it with water so he can get the coffee brewing. His fingers come back double quick again – still too hot to handle.

Luke takes the three steps over to where the sheriff stands, watches as he cringes slightly, as if expecting to be beaten. Silly man gets shocked when Luke starts shuffling through the small clump of bills he's pulled out of his pocket, looking for a few singles amongst the larger denominations. "Here you go, Rosco," he offers.

"Ijit!" There, the noises are back and the pity in Rosco's tone is gone. Things are back to a tolerable shade of normal. There's a long moment's hesitation as the sheriff considers whether the money is somehow booby-trapped, or otherwise poses a danger to lawmen everywhere, then he reaches out a hand and takes it. Shuffles over to his desk and pushes through a few papers until he finds the impounding slip that matches Jesse's pickup, brings it back to Luke. "All right, Luke Duke, you just see Floyd at the impound lot and he'll let you have your vehicle. They'll open at nine in the A.M." Luke pulls his watch out of his pocket and glances at it. It's already nine-thirty. "Tomorrow," Rosco adds with a khee and an egg-sucking grin.

"Rosco," he barks in that voice he learned to use in rice paddies and jungle-covered mountainsides when dealing with unruly young recruits who didn't know when they were courting death.

"Now, Luke Duke," the sheriff says, matching his anger with reason. Far too much reason for a man who's been playing the role of town idiot for the better part of two years. "I know you're upset about Bo and I know who you figure done this to him. And I know what you're going to want to do. I reckon it's best if you ain't got the means to do it for another twenty-four hours." Twenty-three and a half, but who's counting. "I don't want to be an accessory to you crossing county lines and then doling out the kind of beating that'll get your probation revoked. I figure it's for the best if you get time to simmer down, first."

And it's a bad day, one that's going to get worse before it gets better, when Rosco P. Coltrane has a valid point.

Luke takes in a deep breath, lets it out. Stuffs the pink impoundment slip into his pocket and nods his head.

"Don't let the coffeepot outsmart you, Rosco," is his parting advice as he turns to head out the door.

* * *

Voices again, breaking through his sleep. And though he's pretty much tethered to the room, with a sponge bath and bedpan-wielding nurse replacing any need he might otherwise have to get up onto his feet, he's about sick of sleeping.

Now, there's a notion that would surprise Luke after years of those rough hands shoving him out of bed at dawn – Bo Duke doesn't want to sleep anymore. But his cousin's not here to be shocked by the amazing revelation, because of those voices Bo can hear, none of them are Luke's.

Drugged to keep his pain at a distance. He can appreciate the thought, but the reality is that his body reacts too strongly to the painkiller that courses through his veins, and it takes just about as much effort as running uphill in a headwind just to crack his eyes open. His tongue's too dry to lick his sticky lips and it takes a real commitment to the task for him to find something of a voice so that his visitors will realize that he's awake. He must be past the immediate threat of dying (or otherwise being desperately injured) because no one's right there in his face, waiting for him to show some signs of life. It ought to be refreshing, and it would be if the three of them in the corner weren't doing such a great job of ignoring him.

"Hello," Bo croaks out, a means of introduction, because one of the three is a stranger.

"Hi, sweetheart," Daisy coos, extra sweet, like tea with too much sugar in it, and comes out of the corner, getting close to the right side of his bed to greet him. Kiss for his cheek as though he's been gone on a couple days' hunt instead of sleeping only a few paces away from where she's been standing.

"How you feeling, boy?" Jesse, voice bouncing over the words with forced cheer.

"Okay, I guess," he answers, focusing on the stranger with the eyebrows that lift and curve like a nervous tic that wants to take over his whole body. Dressed in a fussy gray suit, his thin, shoe-polish black hair perfectly combed and slicked back in that way that marks him as a man who would be most at home behind a desk. Not a doctor, Bo doesn't think. Though there are many of those who would be happier behind a desk than in front of a patient, they all seem to wear some variation on the white coat, at least here in the hospital. There was talk of him meeting with a physical therapist, but not until his bones have had more time to set. Unless—

"What day is it?" Daisy's clothes have changed, which either means it's Monday, or that he's done more than slept, maybe he's slipped into a coma and is only now coming out, days, weeks or months later.

"Monday," Jesse assures him. And Bo must look as spooked as he feels, because his uncle follows that up with, "September fifteenth."

"Then who's that?" he squeaks out. Jesse's bushy eyebrows come down to silently scold him for being rude, but no one's taken the time to introduce him to the stranger in the room, which has left him to come to his own frightening conclusions.

"Name's Zimbra," the man says, somehow moving forward and leaning back all at once, like he's not sure he wants to get too close. Bo would like to tell him that broken bones aren't contagious, but he reckons he's not so beaten up that Jesse won't whip him for his smart-mouthed manners. "John Zimbra. I wanted to ask you a few questions about your accident, if you feel like you're up to it."

Bo shrugs, rediscovers that his chest is sore with the motion. Better than it was, though. He can breathe and talk without sharp fingers of pain poking at his lungs.

"Mr. Zimbra's investigating the accident," Jesse explains. "He got here a little while ago and was asking me and Daisy what we saw, but he figures he can learn more from you."

Ah, must be a cop, then. Maybe a state investigator in plain clothes, some sort of formality that probably happens whenever a traveling fair or carnival reports an incident.

"All right," Bo agrees. "Fire away."

Zimbra clears his throat as though he's nervous, but now that Bo knows who and what the man is, he doesn't buy it. It's just an act to disarm the people that he interviews. "What do you remember about the accident?"

Yep, just a ploy, because there Zimbra goes, jumping in with both feet. Making Bo relive the thing he's spent so many sleeping hours trying to forget.

"Not much." It's the truth, at least as far as talking to Zimbra is concerned. He's pretty sure the cop doesn't want to hear about the butterflies in his belly before the jump or Luke's voice soothing him after he fell out of the sky. "Just that the General kind of sputtered as I was going up the ramp."

"The General?" Zimbra asks, reaching into his jacket and pulling a tiny notebook out of the inside breast pocket, followed by a slim pen that shines in the overhead lights. Made of nice metal instead of cheap plastic. Those state boys must have far more glamorous offices than Rosco and Enos. The man smells like a pipe full of good tobacco, too, instead of the leftover cigar smoke that clings to the Hazzard law.

"The boys' car," Jesse supplies. "The one Bo here shares with his cousin, Luke."

"You used your car?" Zimbra asks, his voice rising a little too much in the middle. He's surprised. "Not one of the Carnival's cars?"

Bo tries out his shrug again. It comes a little easier this time, maybe because he knows to do it somewhat slower than last time. "The General's got more horsepower than most of the carnival cars, and besides, I'm used to him and he's used to jumping." Or at least he was. Bo sets his mind to believing that the General's no more broken than he is, that with good care, they'll both be jumping again soon.

"All right," Zimbra says agreeably. "So the, ah, General sputtered. Anything else?"

"Just the ground coming up to meet me in a rush." It tries to sound nonchalant. Might even succeed, as far as Zimbra's concerned. But Daisy reaches out to get hold of his good hand and give it a squeeze. "Smoke and flames, and then," Luke's voice telling him it would be all right, "they pulled me out. Next thing I knew, I was waking up here."

"All right," Zimbra says, twisting his pen to bring the ball back up inside of it, reaching for his pocket like he's going to put it away. Then he stops, looks straight into Bo's eyes without a single nervous twitch anywhere on his face. "What about Ms. Benson?" he asks as a last minute sucker punch. "Was there anything unusual about her?"

"I reckon she was worried about whether I was all right." He can remember her hollering a question about his well-being that echoed through the PA system.

"After the jump," Zimbra agrees with a nod. "Anything before? Was she unusually friendly with you?"

"She was my girlfriend," he defends loudly, hears what he has said, starts over. "She is my girlfriend. Of course she was friendly."

Zimbra nods, sympathetically. "All right," he says like he doesn't want to upset Bo, but it's too late.

"Where did you say you was from, anyway?" Bo asks, because state cops – they'd have questions about the car, the ramp, the fairgrounds, anything technical. But personal stuff like him and Diane, that wouldn't matter to them. (And where is Diane, anyway? Maybe she couldn't come on Saturday, and yesterday was Sunday, which she might have figured was a family day, but today, she should be here. Right now, she should be holding his hand, not Daisy.)

"Southern Counties Insurance Company, son. We hold the liability policy on the Carnival of Thrills." Oh, this man's not a cop. He's a weasel, and Jesse and Daisy let him walk right in here and talk to Bo as if he were a trusted family friend. Luke would never have let that happen, but where is Luke?

"And you figure on finding a way not to have to pay the claim, because me and Diane was dating before I crashed?" There's a pull in his legs, a twinge of pain and it's only then that he realizes his body's working on instinct. He wants to get to his feet, to tower over this Zimbra guy and yell in his face so that the man'll know just exactly who he's messing with. Hazzard may be small and her citizens may keep electing crooked county officials, but they're nobody's rubes, they're not all drunk on moonshine, and they're not dumb enough to talk anyone out of an insurance settlement.

"No, son. You don't have to worry about that. Your medical bills will be covered, one way or another."

"Settle down, boy," Jesse growls from his side, hand pressing against his shoulder the keep him from squirming too much in the bed.

"Then what are you doing here?" Bo demands at Zimbra, ignoring Jesse. Mostly. He does try to settle himself back into the bed reasonably comfortably, even if he'd still like to pound some sense into this insurance man.

"Investigating the accident," Zimbra answers evenly, his dark eyes studying Bo intensely. "Do you know that you're the third guy to crash on that same stunt within the past couple of months?"

"I heard some talk around the carnival about some other guys, yeah," but they weren't half the drivers that he is. What was it Diane said to him? _I've never seen anyone take to this kind of thing so fast._ "But they just didn't take well to stunt driving. Diane said I was better than them."

Twitch of eyebrow as Zimbra studies him. "I reckon you probably were," he allows. "If what your uncle and cousin tell me is true."

"It is," Daisy defends. "Why, Bo here can jump the Styx River."

Zimbra's eyes lift from his face to take Daisy in. The wrinkle in the middle of his forehead goes to prove that he has no idea what or where the Styx River is, but he nods at her anyway. He stands ready to believe that Bo is a good driver on the merit of her words.

"But you weren't the first one to attempt the jump and end up in a hospital," Zimbra informs him. "And you weren't the first one to take a liking to Diane Benson, either."

_Cars ain't the only thing I take to quick._

Daisy's hand pats his and he's jolted by the sudden realization that this is not news to her. That discussion between Zimbra and his family before he woke up was about this. And he recognizes the tension in the way her hand moves up to stroke his arm. There's more and he should be bracing himself for it. Except that he's kind of stuck right here in the middle of the room with no protective walls to put between himself and whatever's coming.

"You weren't the only one she took a liking to right back," Zimbra goes on.

Carl said something about that, didn't he? _You won't last any longer with Diane than me or any of the others._ But grapes are known to be sour where older men like Carl are concerned, the ones who are past their prime of prettiness and driving skill.

"I was different," he insists. "We was in love."

Daisy's hand has found his hair now, fingers stroking through it even though it can't be a whole lot of fun to touch when he hasn't been able to clean it since the smoke from the fire, the pain-born sweat and the hours of lying here have made it into a matted mess. He'd shake her off, if he could manage to do it without threat of causing himself even more pain.

"I'm sure you were," Zimbra says and he's got this funny look about him. A slight squint to his right eye, a little tug to the corner of his mouth. Something close to a wince, something that goes beyond sympathy and all the way to pity. Zimbra is feeling sorry for him. "I'm sure you were," he repeats and it's too much.

_Maybe she's just a little out of your league, that's all._

"I reckon," Bo says, and he means to be hollering or at least to sound strong and a mite threatening. But all he manages is the tone of a little kid who has taken a hard fall and has just come to the realization that he's bleeding. Hurt. He puts a hand over his face because it's the only way he can hide his tears. "It's time you was leaving now, Mr. Zimbra."

"Of course," the man mutters, his nervous tone returning. "If for any reason you need me, your uncle has my card."

Jesse's saying proper goodbyes to the man, and Daisy's thanking him for his concern when the sob breaks through Bo's throat. Damn it, he wishes it hadn't happened, wishes he could have privacy for just a few minutes, wishes—

Daisy's back by his side.

"I'm going to call the nurse and get you some meperidine, sugar," she coos.

"No!" It's more of a shout than he meant it to be, laced with more anger than he knew he had in him.

"But sugar—"

"Daisy," Uncle Jesse intervenes. Lord knows where Zimbra is, if he's still in the room witnessing this spectacle or whether he's made a quick escape. Bo's hand's not coming away from his face until the tears stop, or at least slow down, and it doesn't seem like that's going to happen very soon.

"He's in pain, Uncle Jesse!"

"I know, girl," his uncle says, and there are fat, warm fingers stroking against the side of his cheek where his own hand can't quite cover. "But there's some kinds of pain that a man just has to go through without any medicine to help him."

"Where's Luke?" he asks.

Because despite the feuding and fussing the two of them have been doing, there's never been a time when he couldn't count on Luke to make things better. Skinned knees and playground fights, thunderstorms and coyotes in the chicken coop, the loss of their aunt and the loss of the whiskey business – every pain he's ever felt always got better with Luke.

"Where's Luke?" he repeats, louder, more forcefully, demanding an answer.

"I don't know," Jesse answers, and his tone sounds just as miserable as Bo feels.


	4. Old Friends and New Acquaintances

_**Author's Note: **Okay, so I've rambled on the nature of this before, but here I go again. The series wasn't very consistent on a great many things. One of those inconsistencies was the confines of the boys' probation. Sometimes they had to stay in the county, sometimes their limitation was the state line. Whichever way you look at it, they seemed to be able to come and go from Cedar City without any special permissions needed. So I put Cedar City into the opposite end of Hazzard County, which gives the boys freedom to go there at will, even if they have to stay in the county. It kind of begs the question as to why the Carnival of Thrills didn't have to go through Boss to rent those fairgrounds, but I'm going with the notion that they were privately, not publicly, owned. Sometimes it's tricky trying to navigate Hazzard County. (And don't get me started on Capitol City. Or any other inconsistency that you can find in the original series, because I can ramble with the best of 'em.)_

_Ramblings aside, thanks for reading - hope it's as much fun for you to read as it was for me to write._

* * *

**4. Old Friends and New Acquaintances**

There's not a whole lot that he feels grateful for right now. Now when Bo's life has been reduced to being bedridden, not when the General's in a heap in the town garage, not when he can't face his family until he at least begins to fix what he broke. But there are still small mercies, and this is one of them.

The carnival is starting to set itself up for another show within the confines of Hazzard County. Cedar City, which is a lot closer as the crow flies than it is as the rumor crawls. Word of a previous crash may get here before the show on Saturday, but it won't necessarily mean a lot to the people here. It's a winding trip over Frog Mountain on rough old State Route 6 from here to Hazzard, and not many faces are known in both places. The near death of a youngster named Bo Duke won't be of much interest to folks here.

No, about the only common faces between the two towns (because despite its name, Cedar City is not a true city, just another small town with a history of being larger back when there were minerals to be mined) are those of the county lawmen. Which is the part Luke can be grateful for – the only cops who are going to bother to try to chase him down are Rosco and Enos, who can't catch their own tails with both hands. And that's only if they figure out where he is. They don't come over here all that often, either.

Rosco was right, and it would have been respectful to mark that momentous occasion with some manner of obedience or even just recognition. To have been a good boy and waited for Monday morning to come and all the legal steps to be followed, but Luke has neither the time nor the patience for good behavior. Besides, he has no doubt that right turned to wrong the minute Boss got ahold of Rosco, and that come Monday morning there would have been barriers in place to keep him from legally reclaiming Uncle Jesse's pickup, so he went and retrieved it illegally the minute he left the courthouse. Walked his sore legs through the thickening rain, out of town and down Maple Street until the pavement ran out and it was more like slick red mud under his boot soles, sticking and slopping and making a mess of everything from his toes to his knees.

The shivering set in when he passed the last warehouse on the right and had nothing in front of him but road and rain (with the occasional tree to hide under, but wet was wet and standing under a tree didn't do anything other than slow his progress) for another half mile.

Just about the time he could make out the fenced-in impound lot, the wind got mean and a jagged bolt of lightning shimmied across the sky. Not exactly sunbathing weather, but he'd accomplished more dangerous missions in rougher storms. In fact, he sent up a quick prayer of thanks for the cover that the rain provided him. Hank, who has been the weekend guard since Jesse was a boy and now stands about a foot shorter than he used to, was nowhere to be seen. Holed up in the flimsy wooden shack with the sagging roof like he always does when there's even the slightest chance of getting wet, and even if he'd seen Luke climb the chain-link fence (but odds were that he wouldn't, not through the water sluicing down the glass pane of the only window) he wouldn't have come out from the safety of his dry little hovel. All Luke had to do was slosh through the mess of the lot until he found the pickup. The door was unlocked, the key in the ignition where he'd left it when he jumped out at the fairgrounds to pull Bo from the fiery General. Then he'd cranked the ignition, put his foot down on the accelerator and crashed through the gate. He'd lay odds that Hank didn't know what had happened until the rain stopped hours later. He might have gotten around to alerting Rosco before sundown, but he might not have.

By now, of course, the sheriff's department must know what he did, and he's most likely a wanted man. But he's pretty sure they won't be looking for him in Cedar City. Not yet.

After he liberated the pickup, he'd gone back to the Hazzard Fairgrounds to find that there hadn't been a whole lot of change since the night before. Parts of what had been ramps stood out in the rain, and Dave and his team of two were nowhere to be found. Luke had sat in the truck, engine running and heat on high, trying to stop shivering, trying to guess the meaning behind the scattered remnants of a carnival gone bad. He'd ignored his stomach when it started to growl, ignored his legs when they cramped, and watched the muddy mess of a track, waiting for any signs of life. Eventually the rain had let up, the skies had begun to clear and the wind kept right on picking at the leaves until some of them started to slip from their branches and cascade into the puddles littering the grounds. Nothing happened other than his legs and back getting stiff, so he'd gotten out of the pickup and gone for a walk around the perimeter of the grounds. Saw the three men in question under the bleachers, passing a cigarette around and talking like they were in no hurry to be anywhere else, so he'd gone back to the pickup, driven to the access road around back of the fairgrounds, and followed it until it met Old Mill Road.

The farm was exactly as quiet as he expected it to be in the middle of a day when he knew everyone was in the hospital with Bo, so he'd gone right up and parked in the front, then marched into the house to change into clean, dry clothes. Collected the eggs, milked the goats, made sure everyone had plenty of feed and that Maudine had a fresh bed of straw in her stall. Back inside, made himself a couple of sandwiches from the leftover ham from Friday night's dinner, ate one, put the other into Daisy's picnic basket with a few apples and a thermos of lemonade, then went back to his stakeout. But Dave and cohorts hadn't done much except skulk around the grounds and pile a few boards here or there. They'd headed off for the empty cars and Luke had gotten momentarily hopeful that they'd lead him somewhere, but they hadn't done anything more than play a pathetic game of bumper tag around the track. He and Bo could have taken any one of them with one hand tied behind their backs.

At least, they could have when Bo was in one piece and they had the General. Now neither of them had anything at all, not even a lead on where the carnival had gone to next.

When Dave and his companions quit doing laps around the track, they headed up to the viewing platform at the top of the stands, and let themselves into the luxury suite up there. Nothing too luxurious about it, but it would keep them warm and dry through the suddenly fall-crisp night while they waited to find out where to set up next.

Which had left Luke to figure out a few things for himself. Like where, exactly, he intended to spend the night.

He drove for a while, past the farm where he could see the jeep out front and a faint light from the back of the house. Jesse and Daisy were home for the night.

(That was a good sign. Had to be; if they were being kept to hospital visiting hours, that meant Bo wasn't in any immediate danger. Meant that all that talk of clots and internal bleeding hadn't come to anything, anyway. All the bones were still broken, the bruises were still blackening on his skin and he'd never be the same again. Luke needed to figure out who hurt him that bad and quick, so they could be brought to justice and he could face his family again.)

Got the urge to know for himself how Bo was doing and drove right past the farmhouse and over the dirt roads and paved highways until the pickup's tires crunched into the rough lot of Tri-County Hospital, but it was a fool's errand. He couldn't visit now any more than Jesse or Daisy could, he didn't know which window might be the one behind which Bo was housed and he couldn't go peering in through all of them without arousing suspicion and maybe scaring some poor patient to death.

Which was how he found himself back at Cooter's garage, because in truth, he didn't have any place else that he could be, and he needed sleep.

But he hadn't slept much; he'd pounded out more of the body damage on the General Lee and stared at his own message scrawled in the dusty surface of Cooter's desk. How's Bo? No answer had appeared. Then again, the day might have crawled by as slow as a turtle, but it was still Sunday. No one had been here since Luke left in the morning.

This morning, Monday, dawned with more sun than clouds, more chill than warmth, and more hope than the day before. He'd slipped out the garage door, tired, sore and sniffling, filled the pickup's tank and left a five for Cooter under the third barrel out front, just as he and Bo had done a dozen times before. He'd stopped at the diner for a large coffee and a doughnut to go, and then he was on his way to the Hazzard Fairgrounds. His efforts were rewarded today – before nine, the tiny, leftover crew was breaking down and stacking the remnant parts of the carnival in earnest, and by noon they'd loaded a bunch of them onto a trailer and hooked it to a pickup truck that Dave drove off the grounds. Luke had followed him, without effort, to end up here in Cedar City.

And now he's hopped the fence into another forbidden space, the Cedar City fairgrounds. Hiding in reasonably plain view to anyone who might give a serious look (but no one will because they're too busy creating a carnival fantasy world that'll trick a whole bunch of people out of a few dollars in exchange for a few hours of fun), under the grandstand. Watching as the majority of the carnival crew starts to rebuild the rings of fire and pile up the junked cars for yet another rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick that'll end with Diane earning thousands while Bo lies in a hospital bed and maybe never gets up on his feet again.

Dave's come and gone three or four times with bits and pieces of equipment by the time Luke can see the cycle fully repeating itself. Diane and Carl pause in their set-up duties, no longer directing their crew about exactly where and how much and in which sequence, to meet in the middle. To be joined by one young man, then two, then a few more.

No signs this time, no publicized race with a cash prize for the winner. But those boys out there, Luke would bet every dollar in his pocket and then a thousand more that he doesn't have, are all being courted as potential stunt drivers for the Leap for Life. A little discussion, a little flirting and there – right there – Diane makes her bid. A little extra attention for the tall one with the curls in his hair, the one who stands with his shoulders back and his head high with pride. She's settling on her next sucker.

It's not enough, not enough. That's the refrain in his head, the thing he keeps telling himself so that he won't march right out into the middle of the fairgrounds and – what? Deck Diane? It's what he wants to do, but he can't. Even if he can find enough evidence to show that she's more than an opportunist, more than a playgirl moving from one star struck boy to the next, he can't hit her because she's a woman and he's a Duke. Somehow he's going to have to hold himself back long enough to dig deeper, to prove that Diane's as toxic and deliberate in her actions as a black widow spider.

Besides, by now it's somewhere around midday. The middle of visiting hours at the hospital, which means this is Luke's best chance to go to the farm and check the livestock and crops, do some chores and otherwise manage his fair share of the work back home while the rest of his kin are off taking care of Bo.

* * *

"I may be crazy, but I ain't dumb," comes singing down the hallway outside his room at the kind of full volume that's likely to get nurses coming on the run in their near-silent rubber-soled shoes. Hushing like a pack of librarians, but Cooter might just save himself from that fate by popping his head into Bo's doorway to say the rest. "Cra-a-a-azy Cooter coming atcha!"

"Cooter!" Jesse answers back with a smile that's just a little too big, a voice that's a mite excited for a man who spends an awful lot of time explaining that he's not now, nor has he ever been, an uncle to one Cooter Davenport. "Get on in here, ya dang fool." It's said with all the affection in the world, and maybe Jesse is as tired of patting Bo's head as Bo is of having his head patted.

It's not that he wants to be alone, he doesn't. And it's not as though he can get up on his own and go anywhere, or as if the television mounted high on the wall that he discovered yesterday afternoon is all that interesting. The get well cards building up on his bedside table are cheerful and pretty, but he doesn't have the energy to keep looking at them over and over again. He's about done with being coddled, with being told that he can have more pain medication if he wants it, or that it's all right to be miserable right now. What he wants is (Luke) someone to tell him to quit being a baby and pull faces at him. Someone who will treat him a little roughly, like they don't think he's so badly broken that all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put him back together again.

He can't have what he wants, but Cooter might make a good substitute. Swaggering into the room like a drunk man (but there's too much light outside for that to be the case) in his best jeans and red tee shirt – one where the oil and grease stains are older, washed in, never going to fade, but at least the yellow walls won't be smudged black if the mechanic happens to lean up against one.

"Anybody here order a…" Cooter asks, bringing well-wrinkled paper bag that's closer to black than brown from behind his back, "Doughnut?"

Heck, Cooter could get himself tossed out of this hospital just for being too big, too loud, having too much face hair, and if that's not enough, he's smuggled food into Bo's room. Bo hasn't had a whole lot of reason to smile today, but this, right here, does it for him. His friend looking for the same sorts of trouble he always has, making a mess of things and meaning better than anyone ever gives him credit for.

"Bring it here," Bo commands, while Jesse mutters something or other about it being contraband. As if a former moonshiner has a leg to stand on when it comes to smuggling.

Cooter saunters over with a proud little smirk on his face and Bo can all but hear Jesse rolling his eyes at the show going on in front of him.

"I reckon I'll leave you boys alone," the old man mumbles. He probably doesn't want to be party to the illegal meal that's about to take place, but Bo has no dietary restrictions. It's not like eating a doughnut is going to make his leg any more or less broken than it already is.

Cooter swoops over to Bo's left side without thought, unlike almost everyone else who has been approaching from his right, like they're afraid they'll hurt him worse if they get too close to his injuries. He even tries to hand the bag off the Bo's left hand, which is covered from knuckles to elbow in plaster. Bo would take it with that hand, too, if he wasn't so busy grabbing Cooter's wrist with his right, pulling him down for an awkward hug. Smells of sweat and burned rubber, which just goes to show that even cleaned up, Cooter is still Cooter.

"Stay out of trouble," Jesse admonishes, and then he's gone.

"Now, best you take this thing from me," Cooter says, carefully disentangling himself from Bo, which just goes to show that even the town fool is scared of hurting him. And maybe that's a smart thing to be when his lower leg still isn't healed enough to tolerate a cast. Maybe Bo just misses those days when he was unbreakable. "Or I might keep it for myself."

_("Bo, you'd best make up your mind whether you're courting or driving or this is liable to be embarrassing for the both of us." But it was supposed to be good-natured, just Luke reminding him, as he'd done a few hundred times this week alone, to pay attention._

_Thing was, Bo might have already been embarrassed by then, or maybe that's hindsight. A race to prove his prowess and he was the only one who needed a sidekick to do it._

_But it wasn't like that. Or it never had been before. He and Luke were a team, forged and smelted by the testing fires of running moonshine into something faster, smarter, stronger and more daring than either of them had ever been on his own. He'd almost never raced without Luke, who'd almost never raced without him. They switched off driving, though Bo did the lion's share of it, just to keep each other sharp and hungry. Just to make each other work that much harder to keep up. _

_This one race, in front of this one girl, felt different. Maybe because he already knew she wanted him to win, maybe because her eyes were a mirror, reflecting back at him everything he figured he'd ever wanted to see. Admiration, hope, a pretty future with cheering crowds that would adore him. Luke would still be there, he figured – somewhere, just not too close so no one would figure it took two Dukes to accomplish anything worthwhile. For too long he'd been half of a whole and now it was time for him to prove himself, to step out of the shadow that the two of them had created for themselves.)_

At least that's how he remembers it now, already being annoyed with the fact of Luke, if not the man himself, even before the gunshot started the General rolling.

And if that's true, he was a fool. An absolute idiot not to take the time to enjoy his last few happy moments with Luke, not to appreciate what he's had his whole life and was about to lose. When he closes his eyes, drugged or sober, he can feel the sunshine on his left arm, the rumble of the car under his backside and feet, he can smell the heat of the late afternoon, the sweat on his own body and Luke's. He can hear Luke's laugh at Rosco, he can remember that advice about courting and driving and miss it with everything in him.

Then his eyes will open to that empty space where Luke has been all his life – or to Jesse and Daisy trying their best to fill it, to make him forget what he doesn't have. What he's lost over some damned girl that made him feel good for a few days but hasn't bothered to make any effort to see him since he's no longer of use to her.

Of course, Luke hasn't come to see him, either. Bo doesn't have as easy an explanation for Luke's absence as he does for Diane's. At first he figured his cousin had gone after the girl to teach her a lesson, but it wouldn't have taken Luke but a minute or two to manage that. Which means he's gone. Done with Bo, done with being betrayed. Luke never has had any patience for disloyalty, never cared for fickle friends or capricious townsfolk. Now that Bo's turned out to be the biggest traitor of them all, well, he reckons Luke's not coming back. Not into Bo's life, anyway; Jesse's said a thing or two about Luke doing chores back at the farm, so he hasn't turned his back on the family as a whole. Just the one cousin who punched him in the face and told him the farm was too small for both of them.

For all of his thoughts about needing to separate himself from a lifetime of being half of BoandLuke, he never really managed it. But Luke has, Luke's moved forward and gone on without him. Now he needs to figure out some way to do the same.

Instead of stepping out of a shadow, it feels like picking himself up out of a pile of ashes, burned and bruised, and trying to persuade himself that he can be made whole again. He's not convinced he can do it.

"Where's Daisy?" Cooter interrupts his drifting mind. He wonders how long he was quiet, whether he looked sad or tired or all those things that make his remaining kin coo and coddle and worry over him.

"Work," he answers, hears his voice waver a bit with the thoughts he can't quite shake away. "Boss said she could take a couple of days off—"

"Boss said that?"

"Well, yeah, he said something about the early part of the week wasn't busy nohow and he didn't see why he should pay a waitress when he didn't need one, but he was giving her the time off."

Cooter grips at his chest like he's in the throes of a heart attack. "Who knew to old huckster was capable of doing the right thing?"

Or trying, maybe. Failing at that like he fails at every scheme he ever tries to pull. "Yeah, well, I told her to go on to work just the same. She just kept wanting to pump me full of painkillers, anyways." And it's not that he enjoys the pain. In fact, come nightfall he'll be asking for a dose of meperidine. He just doesn't like feeling fuzzy-headed all day. "How's the General?"

Cooter looks around the room, chooses the plastic chair that's been dragged in here over the heavier, more comfortable one that sits in the corner. Grabs it and slides it up to the edge of Bo's bed. Takes a second to point his finger at Bo and the paper bag he's been holding in the tips of his left fingers since Cooter must have handed it over during their greeting. "Best you eat that thing before I beat you to it. I'm on my lunch break, you know." Which means any available food doesn't stand half a chance of survival.

It's the most normal thing anyone's said to him in three days (longer, really, because he was feuding with Luke in the days before he crashed, and everyone was walking on eggshells around him then, too) which draws a genuine smile out of him. It's awkward to handle all the facets of eating when someone's been helping him do it since he ended up here, but he manages to hold onto the bag with just those fingertips and open it with his other hand. From there it's all instinct. Right hand, jelly doughnut, open mouth and it's half gone already.

Meanwhile, Cooter tells him about dings, dents, a bent frame, a broken axle. Burnt and melted hoses and wires, going to take some engine work as well as body work. Some parts he's going to have to order and others he might be able to find in the junkyard. Bo can pay him back in little pieces for the more expensive purchases along the way, but the General will be back up on his wheels eventually.

"Buy what you got to," Bo informs him, licking the last of the crumbling sugar off his lips. Someday someone needs to make a doughnut that lasts for more than two bites. "I reckon the General's covered just like I am."

"Huh?" Cooter asks, taking the empty bag from him and looking inside it. Makes a face like he expected there to be something left over. Same game they've played most Saturday mornings for the past five years or so – the mechanic buys doughnuts and beer, then invites the Duke boys over for "breakfast" and acts surprised when all the food and drink is gone within a half hour.

"Insurance," Bo explains. "From the carnival. An insurance investigator was here yesterday. He said my medical bills was totally covered."

"Well, I'll be a horny toad." The bag gets crumpled and dropped to the floor as if they're in a dirty garage where such things are perfectly normal. Cooter leans back in his chair and scratches at his beard. Bo figures it's only a matter of time before it gets shaved off. The man has a habit of trying to grow face hair, but being intolerant of it once he has it. "That thing had insurance? The way they flew by the seat of their pants I figured you was on your own for all your bills. I mean, I figured Diane would want to take care of you, but she wouldn't have no money to do it with." Well, everyone's entitled to being wrong once in a while. "How's she holding up, by the way?"

"Reckon she's fine," he answers tightly. Cooter's eyebrows go up, but he doesn't say anything more. Man's been dumped by women enough times in his life to know when to hush up. "How about," he stops himself, swallows, points to the plastic cup of water that's been sitting on his nightstand for a couple of days, getting refilled as needed. It's got a bent straw in it so he can hold it and sip, but the nightstand is out of his reach so he always has to get help before he can do something as simple as take a drink.

Cooter grabs it, and unlike Daisy, doesn't try to hold it for him, just puts it into his good hand. "How about?" he echoes while Bo's getting a good, deep drink.

"How about Luke?" he asks, even if he's promised himself he won't. "You – ah, you know how he's holding up?"

"Well," Cooter answers thoughtfully, like he's trying to work himself free of one of Rosco's speeding tickets through careful statements. "He's been doing some work on the General at night," Cooter finally admits.

Well, it's good to know that Luke's taking care of the General. It's just that, of all the things that Bo has ever thought or done or felt, he never thought he'd be jealous of his own car.

* * *

_He's been asking for you._

That's the note that greeted Luke last night, written on the back of a receipt and clipped onto the dusty desk in Cooter's garage with an oversized C-clamp. Close enough to Luke's own scrawled question from a few days back that it was clear that it was meant to be an answer.

_How's Bo? He's been asking for you._

Which isn't much of an answer and yet it's too much. Bo could be dying or he could up on his feet and dancing and it doesn't matter. The only information that Cooter plans to pass on is that Bo's asking for him.

Luke knows Bo's not dying, of course. If the situation were that dire, Daisy and Jesse would be living in the hospital. Neither of them would be going home to do chores or to sleep, or to cook a meal and leave a portion in the refrigerator on a plate for him to grab when he stops by in the afternoon (though he'd bet his uncle doesn't know that Daisy's been putting food aside for him – seems like the sort of thing Daisy would do all on her own). Which means that Bo is just in bad shape and he may or may not be getting any better. The only way Luke's going to know is if he goes to see him, and the only way he can do that is if he can turn whoever hurt Bo over to the authorities.

His money's still on Diane, which is why he has taken up his customary spot under the grandstand of Cedar City's fairgrounds. A lot has changed in the two days since he first found the carnival here. The rings of fire are up, the thirty-two cars are getting stacked. The concession stands are erected and there's a line of bright white show cars parked along the fence, just waiting for one stunt guy or another to get into them with all the trust in the world that at the end of the day he will be as healthy as he was at the beginning. And that's fine for the pros that know what they are risking. It's the fool amateurs – like the tall guy with the fluffy hair that Diane's been courting – that don't know what they are getting into.

He sneezes then shakes his head at himself, annoyed. A stupid cold, the last thing he needs, but it's what he's got.

Diane knows how to pick them, that's for sure. She showed the tall guy favoritism from the beginning, and yesterday he won the silly little road race that Diane and Carl designed. Now the poor sap's in the center of the arena with Diane while everyone around them works hard to get the show together in time for Saturday. The two of them like one statue in the middle of a teeming city of workers, kissing as though they were alone in someone's RV. (No, Luke reminds himself. If Diane is true to form, that invitation won't come until this afternoon. At least she won't be tearing this guy away from his family – he doesn't seem to have any.) Not yet, not yet, Luke reminds himself. He can't let the fluffy-haired guy get hurt, but he needs to wait for some clear evidence before he goes charging out into the middle of the fairgrounds, accusing Diane of all the things he already knows she's guilty of.

"Kissing isn't illegal," comes from a reedy voice behind him. He turns too quickly, smacks his head against one of the support beams that runs through the scaffolding underneath here. "Careful, son."

He's a small man, Luke could pound him into the ground if he was offering a fight, but he's not. His stance is one of submission, even if he's the one who snuck up on Luke. Dressed in a proper suit and climbing around in the cobwebs of a grandstand – he belongs here even less than Luke does.

"Uh, I was just hiding from the boss," he says, figures it counts as truth enough to pass the Jesse Duke test. He sure doesn't want to be seen by Boss Hogg (who is most likely back in his office in the Hazzard Courthouse) and it's not his fault if the nervous little man in front of him takes his words to mean he works for Diane or Carl. "Taking an unscheduled break. Guess I'd best get back to work," he adds with a lopsided smile that he figures makes him look like a guilty crewman who slipped away to smoke a cigarette. It probably helps that he's got that slight nasal drone that always accompanies his head colds.

The stranger cocks his head to the side in curious study of Luke.

"You work for Ms. Benson, then?"

Luke offers up a shrug and another guilty smile as an answer.

"That's mighty interesting," the little man says. "Since your cousin's in Tri-County Hospital right now, recuperating from an accident he suffered when in the employ of that same woman. I wouldn't think you'd work for her, under the circumstances."

"Mister," Luke says, stepping over the low supports between him and the stranger, watching carefully so he doesn't whack his head again. "I reckon you'd best tell me who you are."

There it is, full surrender, hands up and all. Dark eyes swiveling in their sockets to watch him carefully in case he decides to twist the guy's head off. (The idea occurs to him, but he reminds himself that he's going to have a hard time proving that Diane tried to kill his cousin if he's in prison.) "Name's Zimbra," the stranger offers. "John Zimbra, and I'm with Southern Counties Insurance Company."

"That don't explain how you know who I am," though it does explain the suit, anyway. Insurance guys always dress like morticians. Helps business to remind potential customers that they're mortal. "Or why you talked to my cousin."

"We own the policy on the Carnival of Thrills," Zimbra says, his left hand coming down and reaching into his coat. It's the kind of move that ought to have Luke screaming 'freeze!' like Rosco, except that he doesn't figure insurance guys carry guns. And he fully believes that this guy normally spends his days behind a desk, discussing liability and deductibles with small business owners. "My card," he produces as a credential. Funny how he flinches a little bit when Luke reaches out to take it. _John Zimbra_, it introduces. _Investigator and Adjuster_. "Your cousin was the third man to crash in the last few months while performing the same stunt." Zimbra flinches again when Luke stops bothering with the stupid card in his hands and stares hard at him.

"You mean, you knew the jump was dangerous and you didn't try to stop him?" he seethes.

Hands up again, a step back from him. "No, the case didn't get to my desk until after your cousin crashed." Another step back and the man stumbles over a low support. Tips backward, arms flailing in an attempt to regain his balance, but it's no use. He's on his backside in the dirt.

Luke shakes his head at the stupidity – him for wanting to hit the guy and Zimbra's for expecting to get hit when really, he's only here to figure out what happened to Bo. They're on the same side of this thing. He sneezes into the crook of his elbow, rubs his palms on his jeans and offers a hand down to help the poor man up.

"Seems like we're on the same team then," Luke says when Zimbra's back on his feet and dusting the seat of his pants.

"We might be," Zimbra allows. "We're both trying to figure out what happened to your cousin."

"And keep it from happening to anyone else," Luke adds.

"All right then," Zimbra says. "Do you mind if we take this conversation back to my car? I'd just as soon not spend any more time talking about this with all these carnival employees around." It's a good idea. As long as Luke's been staking the place out, using only his eyes, he's felt pretty safe. But he can't say for sure that there's no one close enough to overhear their voices. Besides, he doesn't need to spend another minute under here watching Diane make lovey eyes at her pretty new stunt driver.

"You _are_ Luke, aren't you?" Zimbra asks him as they make their way back out from under the grandstand and to an opening in the fence that Zimbra points to. Luke's been hopping the fence each day and never even noticed the small gap.

"Sorry," he says, offering his right hand like the proper gentleman his aunt and uncle raised him to be. "Luke Duke."

"Well, Luke Duke, what can you tell me about your cousin's accident?"

"It weren't no accident," he answers automatically. "My cousin's too good a driver for that to have happened to him without someone tampering with the car or the ramp or something."

"He used your car?"

"Our car, we share it. And all I can tell you is, the General has made bigger jumps."

Zimbra nods like he's heard that somewhere before. "What about the jump itself?"

Luke shrugs. "I wasn't… I wasn't as close as I should have been. Or at the right angle to really see. But I think he lost power on the ramp."

"That matches what he said." They've passed through the hole in the fence and have come to a stop next to a dark, four door sedan that looks every bit as out of place next to a fairgrounds and Zimbra himself does. Of course it's his car.

"Well, whatever happened to Bo is about to happen to Romeo in there."

Zimbra nods. "Well then, I guess we'd better put our heads together and start working on this if we want to keep that from happening."

Luke huffs. He's not used to relying on strangers, he'd rather be working with Bo on this. But beggars can't be choosers. "All right. But first tell me, how's Bo doing?"

Zimbra shakes his head. "He wasn't too happy, last I saw him. But then, I was the one who broke it to him that his girlfriend in there," he gestures loosely toward the center of the fairgrounds, where Diane was last seen. "All but left him for dead. I reckon he could use all of his family around him right now."

Probably could. Then again, if he's healthy enough to get upset about Diane's treatment of him, he's got to be doing better than he was the last time Luke saw him. And Luke's got work to do before he can face Bo again, anyway.

"Guess we'd better get to work then," he announces.


	5. Going Backward

_**Author's Note: **Just a quick note to bluesunVM and anyone else who has been burned by works in progress that never get completed, not to worry. This story is completely written, but is getting edited and posted in between work and me writing another story. I won't leave you halfway, I promise!_

_Thanks for reading!_

* * *

**5. Going Backward**

He's begun giving in every time anyone suggests an injection of meperidine for him. As Jesse pointed out, there are some kinds of pain it can't really touch, but he's about sick of the kind it actually can help. Maybe he thought he could tough it out, that he could let the ache in his hip and the burn in his lower leg and thumb work their way out of his system, but days and days of hurting have caught up with him. It's not, despite Doc Petticord's assurances that he's doing a good job of healing, getting any better. His lower leg will get encased in plaster later today or tomorrow as a testament to his improvement and all he can think is that more of him is going to disappear beneath blank whiteness, and who knows if he'll ever see it again.

Despite the fact that he keeps telling Daisy to just go ahead and go to work, she always seems to be here. Could be that she's skipping out on work or it might just be a trick of time's passage. It's always later than he thinks, tomorrow always seems to encroach on today.

"Go to work," he mumbles again when he feels the softness of a hand on his forehead, pushing his hair back.

"I will," she grouses back at him. "When my shift starts. Right now I ain't got nothing more important to do than be here with you." The words mean well, even if the tone is worn right through to the bare threads.

"Morning," he grumbles, figures that must be what time it is if it's before Daisy's shift, and maybe a friendly word will get her to leave him alone and let him sleep.

"Morning," she answers back, and he forces his eyes open enough to see her smile. No teeth in it, just a light upward curve of her lips that tries to look hopeful about him being awake, but fails. "You want some lunch, sugar?"

Lunch. It must be later than he thinks. Did he have breakfast? He knows he's been attended to by Shirley, his long-suffering nurse. He remembers that she grumbled about how little he was helping her as she finagled the bedpan under him. She wasn't as gentle as she could have been, but it wasn't his fault that he was too strung up (and strung out) to move a whole lot.

"Do you good to eat, boy," Jesse says and Bo forces his eyes to clear and to focus. Daisy's got the plastic chair pulled up to the right side of his bed, while Jesse stands at her shoulder, both of them studying him closely, like he's some kind of new pest found munching on the corn as it grows in the field. The wheeled bed table that they pull over him from time to time when they want him to eat or sign some new consent form is pulled over to the side, but it's got a covered tray on it. If the food's already been delivered and set aside, it's got to be getting pretty close to afternoon.

He's not really hungry, but the sooner he eats, the sooner they'll leave him be, so he nods his assent.

There's a shuffle in the room as chairs get moved and the table gets rolled over to him. He doesn't pay it any attention, just lets his mind drift like it's been doing lately. Funny thing about being medicated – the time seems to pass more pleasantly, even if he can't control his brain. He tells himself not to worry about Diane or Luke, but mostly his thoughts seem to drift around both of them. Memories and dreams mix, and even if he doesn't really want to relive the past week, he keeps doing it over and over again anyway.

(_The sight of the RV was a welcome excuse to walk away from stringing the fence, a chore that neither of them had ever much cared for and which his cousin insisted on doing at breakneck speed to get it over with. Not that it ever worked to push through on Luke's schedule; when they got done there was always more work awaiting them. They'd gotten a late start after Luke scraped up his arm pretty good rescuing a hen from where she'd gotten stuck between the coop and the barn wall. She'd been freed from her predicament and waddled off without so much as a squawk of gratefulness when Bo had noticed the blood coursing down Luke's arm and sent him inside to get cleaned up. By the time he had finished the chores and followed his cousin in, Daisy had Luke cornered and was pouring peroxide into his wound while the tough guy pretended that it wasn't sheer burning torture that he was being subjected to. Face scarlet and tears at the corners of his eyes, but Luke was stoic. Only the need to make breakfast had finally pulled the girl away from her efforts to scrub all the skin off of his arm._

_Eating late had set everything else off schedule, and the two of them hadn't loaded the poles and wire into the truck and driven it out to the west end of the property until nearly nine in the morning, and by the time the shiny, white RV kicked up the dust of Rosebud Road, they hadn't accomplished much. But Luke must have been badly enough beaten up for one day that he was willing to take a break, and Bo wasn't the kind of fool to go looking a gift horse in the mouth. _

_At first, the pretty lady who sat in the passenger seat as the vehicle slowed was just the icing on the cake, but when he saw the way Luke threw his shoulders back so that every muscle stood out, Bo knew what this was. A competition over the newest girl to pass through and they'd done it a hundred times before._

_She chose Bo, right there on the side of the road, even as she was explaining that she was the owner of a stunt carnival that traveled the area and was looking for a new town in which to put on a spectacular show, the likes of which he'd never seen. Smiled right at him and his tanned face and broad chest as he told her about the Hazzard Fairgrounds, and sent her to see Boss Hogg. She never even gave Luke and his tightly bunched shoulders another look, even when he took over giving directions to Boss's auxiliary office in the Boar's Nest._

_At the time he'd thought it was him and Luke, battling it out for the pretty lady named Diane. It took a few more days for Bo to realize that it hadn't ever been that, it had always been Luke and Diane battling it out for _him.)

"Bo! You've got to pay attention." Right, Daisy's trying to feed him. A spoonful of unidentifiable soft food in a neutral color is being held out in front of him. He opens his mouth like a baby bird and lets her shove it in. Lets her scold him once again: "You're making this harder than it has to be."

* * *

Another useless day spent watching a young guy, whose name is Bob Dexter according to Zimbra's inquiries, get courted and kissed by Diane Benson. Not unfolding nearly as slowly or colorfully as her early relationship with Bo, but then this Dexter fellow doesn't have anyone to inform him of what a fool he's being. Diane tells him he's one of the best drivers she's ever seen and he just strives all the harder to be number one in her eyes. Meanwhile Carl limps around the edges of the fairgrounds and glowers at their overt affection like they're a pair of undisciplined kids. Luke kind of agrees with that point of view.

"We're going about this all wrong," he realizes as he stands under the bleachers. Hiding, because there are far too many people involved with the carnival who know his name and his face. All it will take is for one of them to recognize him and sound the alarm, and the bouncer-like guards that work for the fairgrounds will be glad to remove him bodily. At least mostly; their reputation says they wouldn't be sad to throw most of him out, while keeping his arms as souvenirs.

"What?" Zimbra asks him. The man may look like he just stepped out of the local tax assessor's office, like he's lost without a desk in front of him and numbers to crunch, but at least he can move freely about the place. People will see him and not think anything of it. Not that he looks like he belongs here, he doesn't, but he also doesn't look like anybody to worry about. Just some lost man, smoking a pipe and occasionally talking into his hand, which holds a small cassette recorder.

Luke coughs into his sleeve at the elbow, wipes his other arm across his forehead to get rid of the sweat there. The day has somehow managed to be both warm and chilly, sweaty and yet the breeze is enough to make him shiver when it gusts against his moist skin.

"This," he says, pulling his arm down from his head to gesture out at the grounds around them. "You figure there's a pattern to these crashes, right?"

Zimbra's head – which is too big for the rest of his body Luke decided somewhere in the last day of working with him – nods his agreement with that theory.

"Well, we already know how this part goes. She courts him and flatters him," and otherwise separates her carefully chosen sucker from his senses. "Then he near-about kills himself for her. She gets her thrills," and that's why the carnival is named what it is, no doubt. Because somehow it's exciting to Diane to make a man go to such lengths to please her that he almost dies, "and takes her money and runs to the next town."

Such a serious face. Not earnest like Enos; this guy is shrewder than that. But he's deliberate and annoying for how long he thinks before he does anything at all. "Well, something like that, anyway." Zimbra's been holding back on committing to Diane as his primary suspect. _The only thing we know for a fact about her_, Zimbra had told him last evening, _is that she's pretty quick to move on, romantically speaking. And while that's not pleasant for you to see after what happened to your cousin, it's not a crime._

But it ought to be.

"Seems to me that if we want to know what's going to happen next, we need to go backward," Luke explains. "And look at what's happened before." He coughs again, tries to hold it back. It was hard enough to get Zimbra to leave him alone last night. The man should be someone's father for all the worrying he was doing, the insistent offers to drive Luke home over a few sniffles and a tired cough.

"Neither you nor your cousin has been able to say much about his accident."

"And the General's not in any real shape to tell tales, either." He'd finally managed to assure Zimbra that he was just fine and sent the man off to whatever hotel he's been staying in before heading back to Hazzard last night. Went past the farmhouse again to see that Daisy and Jesse were home, which reassured him that Bo wasn't in any immediate danger. Then he'd gone back to the garage for the night. Found that he and Cooter had themselves a regular correspondence going. At the bottom of Cooter's note, Luke had scrawled: _But how is he doing?_

Cooter's answer: _He misses you._

Luke hadn't bothered to work on any part of the General last night. He'd been tired enough to just climb up into the loft and try to sleep. He'd done all right, he supposed, except for waking up often with a cough rising from the back of his throat. He'd awoken for the final time this morning after the sun had risen. He didn't have time to leave another note for Cooter – there wasn't anything left to say between then anyway – before heading to the farm to do some late morning chores, then driving back here to Cedar City to meet up with Zimbra. He hasn't bothered with breakfast or lunch, doesn't much want dinner, either.

"So what are you suggesting?" Zimbra asks.

"You know where the carnival was before it came to Hazzard, right? Someone made a claim somewheres, right?"

Zimbra pats his pockets like he's looking for a pen or piece of paper; Luke sneezes.

"In my car," Zimbra admits, gesturing for them to leave the shade of the grandstand and the confines of the fairgrounds to head over to where they've parked their vehicles along a line of trees. "I've got that information." If Luke isn't exactly eager to part with the cooling shade of this underworld he's spent so much time lurking in, the cars seem like a good idea. Can't accomplish a dang thing hiding in the cobwebs, but driving – well, he and Bo have fixed more problems on a single drive than most people can solve all year.

They walk a path that his feet have worn into the grounds here over the last few days. It's about time they were leaving, anyway. They've become such regulars here that there's no way they won't draw attention to themselves soon.

"We got to go back," Luke explains, "to wherever that is, and see what that guy has to say. Or the guy before that," in case the first one won't – or can't – talk. Luke grabs Zimbra's arm to still him, even though they're not yet off the fairgrounds and they're in relatively plain sight. "Has anyone died in one of these Leap for Life crashes?" He shivers, tells himself it's the fall-like breeze through the rustling leaves that does it.

"No," Zimbra answers. "Your cousin was probably hurt worst out of all of them."

So no one has died, but Bo came the closest. That's not exactly comforting. Luke releases his hold on the older man and they slip through the opening in the fence to wander back toward their cars. There's no real explaining it, but the closer they get to the line of trees, the easier Luke breathes.

Zimbra opens his car door with a quiet click while Luke pulls the tailgate of the pickup down. Sits on the edge, then lays back into the bed. Might as well rest a minute while they decide what to do next. He looks up into the canopy of leaves overhead, mostly still green but with some bright yellows and oranges popping out. He's brought back to himself by the soft clearing of Zimbra's throat. He sits up a little dizzily and pats the tailgate next to him in silent invitation for the insurance investigator to hop up and sit with him. The man takes a look at the spot Luke's offering, shakes his head slightly and fiddles with the papers in the manila folder that he apparently retrieved from the briefcase in his car while Luke wasn't looking. The pickup bed has been deemed too dirty for Zimbra's charcoal-gray suit. Seems to Luke like the guy ought to invest in a pair of jeans if he's going to go sneaking around in less than pristine places.

"Here we go," gets muttered over the shuffling of papers. Luke pulls one leg up onto the tailgate with him, heel propped on the edge, and remembers sitting this way with Bo when they were kids. Weeds in their mouths and heads tipped as far back as they could get them, watching July Fourth fireworks explode outward over Lake Chickamahoney. "Daniel Clarke down in Macon, August sixteenth. Broken ribs and concussion. He was out of the hospital the next day, after observation."

"You were right about how he wasn't hurt near as bad as Bo." Heck, that sounds no worse than tumbling the wrong way off a horse, and if that was all that had happened to Bo—

No point in thinking that way. He has to play the hand he's dealt.

"What about the other one?" he asks, because Macon's well out of the range of where his probation allows him to go.

"Hmm," Zimbra says, rifling through his papers again. "A boy named Jacob Sanders over in Gainesville, July twenty-sixth." Still too far away for Luke to go, legally speaking, but quite a bit closer. The kind of distance that can gone to and back within a few hours' time. "Fractured ankle, compressed disks in his spine, dislocated shoulder. Released from the hospital the same day, some rehabilitation still to come on his spine, but he's expected to make a full recovery."

Luke just about chokes at the sound of those last words. Coughs, tears in his eyes, turns away and makes a show of it being no worse than any other coughing fit that he's had in the past few days, even if it lasts longer and he has to wipe moisture away from his face when it's done.

Full recovery. That's a luxury, really. Something he's never thought to be grateful for before. After each mean spill on the football field or run in with the business end of Maudine's hoofs on the farm, on those rare occasions that they even sought a doctor's advice, he and Bo were always told they'd make a full recovery. So many times they've bounced right back to their feet; it never occurred to him that there would ever be a time when one of them couldn't.

"Why was Bo hurt so much worse?" he growls, maybe a little more roughly than he means to. But his throat hurts, his eyes hurt, his head hurts and he knows life's not fair, he's known it since he was an orphaned boy. But damn it, why does it have to be so utterly unfair when it comes to Bo? The man wouldn't think of hurting a fly if it didn't hurt him first.

"Near as I can figure," Zimbra answers, as if the question were not rhetorical. "They hadn't gotten up as much speed as your cousin had before whatever happened… happened." The investigator's just as straightforward as ever, sparing no careful words on an angry former Marine boxing champ that might just be tempted to knock the block off of anyone who upsets him. Somewhere under his cold, under his frustration and worry, Luke can appreciate that. "They both just kind of tipped over the edge, instead of leaping into the middle of the piled of cars."

"So, basically, Bo was a better driver than them." One who knew how much speed he needed and who eked every bit he could out of his car before it gave out on him at the wrong moment.

"I suppose," Zimbra says, but he has no idea. He doesn't know the first thing about driving, about stunts or races or anything other than his papers and his little tape recorder. He's out of his element and it's up to Luke to make all the decisions. Which doesn't mean Zimbra can't be useful, if pointed in the right direction.

"The way I see it," Luke says, "we should split up. I'll go to Gainesville and you go to Macon. We'll each track down our guy and see what we can learn. If we leave now—"

"Whoa," the insurance man says, closing the folder and holding up his right hand like a cop directing traffic at a busy intersection. "Neither of us is going anywhere further than bed tonight. You're not going to do your cousin any good by staying up all night chasing down guys who are probably going to be sleeping when you get there anyway. You need to go home and get some rest. Though you should probably stop by the hospital and see your cousin, first."

Then again, for all his shortcomings, Zimbra can be persistent. Dogged, even.

"All right, first light then. You'll head out to—"

"Ten in the morning, no earlier. And we go together." Downright determined at times. "I can't give you personal information about our cases. It's one thing if I take you along with me as an assistant and quite another if I tell you where to find someone whose confidential information I am in possession of as a function of my job." Obstinate. If Luke weren't so tired, he'd have to give the man a piece of his mind. But all he can muster right now is another cough. "Besides, we may be able to get all of the information we need from just one of them without having to spend the time or money making two separate trips." Zimbra's heading back over to his car and the briefcase that's lying open on the hood. Putting the folders back in then snapping it shut like the final word on the matter. "Go home. Rest. I'll meet you here tomorrow at ten and not before." The man walks over to his car door, opens it, tosses the briefcase into his passenger seat before sitting behind the wheel and starting it up. In another few seconds, he's gone.

There's nothing for Luke to do but slide his sluggish way off the tailgate of the truck, close it up, then head for the passenger compartment. Back to the garage, where he finds the back door unlocked, which means he doesn't have to climb on the roof (and also means Cooter's making this easier for him). Once he's inside, he takes a few minutes to look at the General. The car looks about as tired and miserable as Luke feels, and if he had any energy at all, he'd spend some more time trying to put the poor thing back together again. Figures maybe he'll take a nap, then get up early and do a little work on the car before heading back to the farm and doing some chores, then off to meet Zimbra by ten.

The ladder up to the loft never has seemed so steep, but he climbs it anyway, then heads over to the bed. Flops down hard, drops his arm over his eyes, and lets the world go dark around him while he goes over tomorrow's plans in his head.

The next time he's awake, it's full light outside, and Cooter's standing over by the ladder.

"Good morning, buddyroe," he says.

* * *

"Luke?" he says, even if he knows better. He was thinking of Luke or dreaming of him. Mind wandering over the last time they'd done any stunt work. Or he had, trying to prove to Augie Detweiller that they were worth employing. Just a little proving himself on a track and then Augie's sidekick Shoulders had pulled around in that slammer car with a trunk full of cement and malicious intent. _Limit the damage to your half of the car, okay?_ Luke had offered as encouragement when it was the General's hood up on the chopping block, and Bo's hand on the steering wheel. _Thanks for that note of confidence in my hour of need_, Bo had snapped back at him. But it hadn't meant anything, hadn't been more than a two-second show enacted for a gullible audience that didn't know anything about them. They'd been on the same side of that battle.

"Morning, sugar," Daisy says to him, touching his face so he'll open his eyes.

The other person in the room isn't Luke and never was. Before he opened his eyes it was just another male voice that didn't sound one bit like Luke's, and now that he's fully awake, it's Enos. Which he must have known all along; there's no one else whose voice squeaks quite like that, no one who can make Daisy go this soft and gentle and sweet.

His brain's set on tormenting him all the same. Enos in plaid, can't be – either it's Luke with Enos' head or Enos with Luke's body. He blinks; the vision doesn't change. Rubs his eyes with his good hand and no matter how hard he tries, the creature in front of him insists on being half-and-half.

"Morning, Daisy. Hi, Enos," he tests out. The voice and the face, not to mention that Enos has already come to see him before when Luke has not – odds are it's the deputy.

"Hi, Bo," gets chirped right back at him. Yep, it's his cheerful friend and not his sour cousin, all right. "How are you feeling?"

He shrugs. About the same, give or take the fact that his chest and head don't really hurt anymore. But that's made up for by the soreness of his hip. He keeps thinking that if he could just get his leg out from the wires and frame that hold it up all the time, he could work out some of the stiffness. But Shirley, the nurse that brings his bedpan and scrubs him raw with a washcloth each day, tells him not to even think about it. _If you want to walk again_, she's in the habit of saying, _you'd best just leave things as they are._ She a tough old bird, older than his mother would be were she alive now, but Bo kind of likes her. She doesn't tolerate nonsense.

"Doc Petticord says I'm progressing all right," he tells Enos. "It's just going to take time."

"Well that's good, Bo, that's nice," the deputy gushes. "You look real good, too." Oh, Bo doubts that. Shirley does a reasonable job of getting him clean, but she sure doesn't take any time to make him pretty. "You've got color in your cheeks," the poor man has no hat to take off and play with, nothing to do with his hands, but he's got them held up in front of his chest anyway, fingers twiddling. Miming opening all those buttons down his front, like he knows he should be in blue and not plaid, like he knows how silly he looks when he poses as a civilian. "Even if you do look a bit tired."

"Enos," Daisy snaps at him, and that's interesting. She's almost never cross with him; if she's upset, she lets Bo and Luke have it, but she saves whatever sweetness she can manage for the man who's crazy about her.

"I'm sorry, Daisy," he answers with all the sincerity in the world.

"Men," she huffs back at him, hands on her hips, blood red nails against denim blue. Hair flying, chest out like this is some kind of a fight that's been building up while he slept and he's only coming in on the end of it.

"What's going on?" he asks, cautiously. Daisy's been careful with him since he got hurt. She hasn't said a rough word or offered to beat him senseless even once, but there's no guarantee that she won't change her mind about that at any time. She is a woman, after all, and clearly angry with the loose category of _men_, into which he still fits, even if he's flat on his back.

"Nothing," Daisy hisses at him, in that way that proves that it is clearly something.

"Where's Jesse?" Surely the old-timer would put an end to whatever this is (and it looks suspiciously like Daisy being rude to a guest, if Enos could be called a guest in a room that none of them owns).

"Chores," she spits. Whoops. He'd hold up his hands in surrender, except she's not even looking at him.

"I'm going to go see where your breakfast is," she says to him, still glowering at Enos, who is still fidgeting with the air in front of his chest. It's like watching a bug on its back being poked by a little girl with a stick. Destined to end in gore. "Sugar," she adds, so Bo will know it's his breakfast she's gone off in search of. Not that he's in any hurry to eat more hospital food. Or any food, really. He just hasn't been all that hungry the past couple of days.

"Okay," he offers as an olive branch anyway, in hopes that she won't start looking at him the same way she's looking at Enos.

Strong smell of perfume as she pushes past the deputy to get to the door. Click of heels, and she's in her best jeans and a flattering purple blouse that's got one extra button opened at the top. Oh, she's a mite too dressed up for visiting kin in the hospital. Seems she knew Enos was coming this morning. (Which means whatever she's mad about, she's had quite a while to work herself up into a full-out tizzy.)

"What did you do?" Bo asks conspiratorially when the clicking of the heels is far enough down the corridor that he figures he won't be heard.

The smile on the man's face looks about as real as a three dollar bill. Looks just about as terrified as Daisy's mood warrants and if Enos were smart he'd be running now. Or looking for defensive weapons.

"Enos?" But their friend isn't smart, isn't anything like smart at this moment. His brain's taken a vacation, run off somewhere to hide from the fury that is Daisy. It's up to Bo to save them both, even if he is confined to a hospital bed and otherwise incapacitated. "What happened?"

"I reckon," Enos whispers, his mouth hardly moving from that stiff smile. Like he's doing some sort of a ventriloquist act, or like he's playing a strange kind of dead. His fingers aren't wiggling in the air anymore – maybe he hopes if he's perfectly still, Daisy won't kill him after all. "She's mad at me because I lost my job."

"You what?" when Doc listed all Bo's injuries, he never once mentioned that any damage had been done to his hearing. Still, he figures something must have gotten in his ears.

"I got fired," Enos confirms. "I reckon it was my own fault, and I can see where Daisy's disappointed in me, but I did it to help y'all. Or at least not to hurt you no more than you already are."

"Wait," Bo says. Doc Petticord said the concussion could leave him confused, but he can't say that he has been until now. Besides, his head's better. He'd swear on that. Still, none of what's happening now makes any sense. "You got fired trying to not hurt us?"

"Well, not you, Bo. You're already hurt." Good thing Enos cleared that up for them both. Otherwise Bo might have wondered why he had to be so thoroughly packed in plaster. "But more like the rest of y'all. Especially Luke."

"Luke? What's wrong with Luke?" He ought to be more concerned than he is, probably. Still, just about his last clear memory of Luke is the two of them in separate jail cells, having a final mean little discussion about the General, the jump and Diane. Then Carl came along to free him and Luke refused any assistance Bo might have offered towards getting him out as well_. I'd stay in jail until I was Jesse's age before I'd take a dime of your money._ If Luke's in jail again (it would explain why he hasn't come to see Bo in the hospital, at least) it's probably because that's where he wants to be.

"Well, Mr. Hogg says it's grand theft auto—"

"What?"

"But your Uncle Jesse says it's his truck that's been stole and he ain't pressing no charges."

"What?"

"But Mr. Hogg says it was county property when it got stole and furthermore Luke's a fugitive from the law, and with y'all's probation and all—"

"Enos, would you make sense?"

"Well, it don't rightly make no sense to me, neither," Enos insists. "But Mr. Hogg's got a manhunt going on for Luke when all he done was bust Jesse's pickup out of impound on Sunday. And your uncle offered to pay for the damages to the fence, which weren't no more than a hundred dollars. Besides, Luke paid the impound fee, so I don't rightly see why Mr. Hogg had to call in the state police."

"The state police?" Damn Boss, damn Luke for being a fool – whatever kind of fool he's being – damn Enos for only knowing half the story, damn Jesse for not being here and damn the contraption that's got hold of his leg so tightly that he can't even sit up.

"Bo, Bo!" Enos is squealing, stepping right up to the bed and holding his shoulders down. He may be clumsy, but the deputy's got some strength in his arms. And all the leverage he needs to hold Bo still. "Settle down now!"

"Enos, if the state police get Luke—" his probation will get revoked and he'll be in prison for ten years, probably. By the time he gets out he'll be too old to take the beating that Bo still halfway wants to dole out to him.

"I know, and that's how I lost my job. I told Mr. Hogg that I – Bo, settle down!" A breathless moment while they push and shove against each other, but Bo's overmatched. He gives up the fight. "I told Mr. Hogg that I didn't want to help him frame you boys no more. And he fired me."

"Did you," Bo has to pause for a second to catch his own breath. "Did you tell Daisy all that?"

"Yes, and Uncle Jesse, too. That's why your uncle went to Boss and offered to pay for the fence. But Boss refused him and told him Luke was a known criminal, and he wouldn't rest until the public was safe from the menace of Luke Duke."

"Then why is Daisy mad at you instead of Boss?"

"I reckon she's mad at both of us, Bo. Boss for firing me and me because I'm leaving."

"Leaving?" None of this makes any sense. Then again, none of it needs to. All that's important is that Luke's in trouble.

"You know I been applying to police departments in big cities from around the country." Sure, everyone knows that, just like they know Boss wants to be the Governor of Georgia. It's one of those things that a man strives for, but it never really happens. "Well, I got a job in Los Angeles. I leave tomorrow." Except, apparently, sometimes it does. "I reckon Daisy thinks I could be more help to y'all if I stayed here, but without my badge, I can't do much of nothing for you. Besides, if I don't have a job, I can't never ask for her hand in marriage."

Only Enos would be thinking of getting married at a time like this.

Bo's thinking of Luke. Who is, admittedly, a jackass.

(_He'd won the race. That might have been the part that Luke forgot first, that Bo had won the race through the fairgrounds and the surrounding country. Even lost Rosco on Jeb Thompkins' land, and the only finger Luke had lifted to help came in the form of CB chatter. Everything else had come down to Bo, including making up the time they lost getting rid of the law._

_Damn it, Bo had won. He'd earned what was offered. Luke was just sore that he'd won the girl and the race both in the same day. That the offer of a job was for a stuntman, not stuntmen, that there was no special little exception made for Luke Duke to accompany him. Not this time._

_Luke had started right in about how the jump was dangerous, Daisy'd been no help when she didn't have the first idea how the jump even worked._

Are the cars lined up side by side or end to end?_ she'd asked and it was the closest to a smile that Luke came that afternoon or any time since. Bo had ignored both his cousins and accepted the job offer. Luke's lips curled down at the corners and he'd stared off at the horizon like he hated everything from the land to the sky. _

_That sour look had followed the three of them home and right into the kitchen where Luke started trying to turn Jesse against him. It only halfway worked – Jesse wasn't too keen on the delay in picking up the prize money, but he understood about the job. Understood that Bo was a good enough driver to pull the stunt off, understood that now that he had a job, he couldn't stay for lunch. He had to go back to the fairgrounds and meet with his new boss._

_Luke had mumbled all kinds of unpleasant things under his breath, made mean faces at his bowl of crawdad bisque, but in the end he'd asked Daisy to lend Bo the keys to her jeep. _What's wrong with the General,_ he'd asked, and Luke had answered, _nothing, I hope. But if you're planning on jumping him over thirty-two parked cars, I'm gonna take him over to Cooter's and check the timing.

_And that was – Luke didn't agree with him, didn't like what he was planning to do. Liked, even less, being outvoted within the family, but it didn't matter. If Bo was going to take a chance with his life, Luke was going to make sure that the odds were in his favor._)

Luke may be a jackass, but he's always taken care of Bo, even when Bo didn't want him to.

"I got to help him," he mutters, digging his elbows into the mattress with all the intent in the world of getting up and—

He doesn't even know what, and it doesn't matter. Enos isn't prepared for him to try to stand again, doesn't provide resistance. Which means that Bo's efforts halfway work until he tries to move his left leg.

White hot pain from his hip to his ankle, and he folds back against the bed with a whimper. Luke's out there alone, in trouble, and Bo is powerless to help him.


	6. Breaking and Exiting

**6. Breaking and Exiting**

"What time is it?"

It is, maybe, a dumb place to start this conversation. Which has to be decidedly short, and the time is not essential information. (But it would be useful to know.)

Cooter shrugs his lack of knowledge. "Past opening," is all he has to offer, which isn't particularly helpful, either, when the garage can open anywhere from eight thirty (rarely) to nine thirty (more often).

Luke's on his feet without thinking, a whoosh of air in his ears and a wave of dizziness making him bend and rest one hand on the bed until it passes.

"You're a mess," his friend observes. But once the world around him settles, Luke's actually pretty sure he feels better. Sure, his nose is running, but at least he's not quite as tired as he was yesterday.

"I'm fine," he mumbles, reaching into the pockets of the jeans he never saw fit to shuck last night. Right hand front has his watch, left hand back has his handkerchief and it's hard to say which of them he needs more. The handkerchief slides out easily, so he uses that first, then looks at his watch. Nine twenty-five. Could be better, but that's not too bad. No time to stop at the farm and see to whatever chores need doing, but if all goes well, he'll get to that this afternoon. The trip to Gainesville and back shouldn't take more than four to five hours. Six if they run into any kind of trouble. "I got to get going."

"Luke," Cooter tries, but he doesn't have time to discuss it. Zimbra's going to be waiting for him, and though it's a pretty good bet that the halfway-timid investigator won't leave without him if he's late, he'd rather not find out he's wrong about that part. Especially since the man was unwilling to part with the specifics of where the poor sucker lived. Jacob-something. Usually Luke's better at remembering details, but he might just have been at the end of his rope last night after all. It's a good thing Zimbra sent him to get some sleep, and it would be better if Cooter wasn't following after his every step as he heads for the loft's dirty little bathroom. "Luke," his friend tries again.

"Just a sec," he says, holding up one finger and stepping into the small space that contains a toilet, a narrow sink, and nothing else. Not even a mirror, and that part's probably good. He doesn't want to know what he looks like with several days growth of beard on his face and a thick coating of fairground dirt everywhere else.

Fortunately, Cooter sees fit to give him this moment of privacy. Maybe because there's nothing bigger than a vent in here, no window through which he could escape.

Luke's quick about his business, and when he's done, he finds Cooter exactly where he expects to. Both hands on the doorframe, leaning heavily against it like he's planning to block Luke's path.

"I got to go," Luke reminds him, which is as much of a warning as anything. _Don't get in my way or you might get hurt._

"I got to tell you something," Cooter says, but he gives ground. He may play the fool but he's smart enough to care about self-preservation. "It's important," he insists.

"Talk fast, then," Luke says, but he's not particularly in the mood to listen. He stops by the bed just long enough to grab his boots, which he at least took a moment to kick off last night, and to sneeze. Then he walks over to the edge of the loft, considers jumping, considers his sock feet and starts to climb down the ladder, one-handed, instead.

"Luke," Cooter says from above him. "Stop."

"Ain't got time to stop, Cooter," he answers back. Reaches the ground, walks over to the bay into which Cooter has pulled his favorite tow truck, then closed the doors behind it. (Odd that Cooter did that, odder that Luke slept through it. At least his clogged nose keeps him from smelling the exhaust that must fill the place.) Convenient that it's there, anyway; Luke leans on it and pulls on one boot then the other as Cooter trundles down his own ladder. "I got to meet someone in a few minutes."

"And I got to tell you something important."

Luke kicks his heels against the floor to get his boots properly set on his feet.

"I suppose you could come with me, if you want," he offers as a compromise. "You'd have to get your own ride back here, or walk, though. I won't have time to bring you back."

"Back from where?"

"Cedar City fairgrounds," he answers, digging into his pockets again. Keys to the pickup, ought to be somewhere.

Cooter whistles, low and meaningfully. Seems like he might just have heard who the current fairgrounds tenants are. "How come?" he asks, suspicion in his voice, slight squint to his left eye. The man's thinking double hard.

"Ride with me, if you want, and I can tell you. But I got to get there by ten." If he can ever find his keys, that is. Not that a Duke really needs keys to start a car, but Jesse does get testy when his steering column's been jimmied and his truck hotwired. He'd just as soon not give his uncle yet one more reason to want to tan his hide badly enough that he can't sit for a month.

"Best you ride with me, then," Cooter says, walking across the short span of cement flooring to where Luke stands.

He'd argue, but given his lack of keys and the fact that Zimbra can drive them to Gainesville once he gets to the fairgrounds, it's a pretty good offer. Until, that is, the mechanic opens the storage panel on the side of his truck and pulls out the canvas he's been known to use to cover the cargo he carries in the back from time to time, and starts securing it to the bolts on the side of the bed.

"Cooter, I ain't got time for this."

"You ain't got time not to do this, buddyroe. Just help me." Luke stands where he is, staring at his friend. Looking for blood or swelling or other evidence that he has recently hit his head. "Help me," Cooter repeats, "and trust me."

That gets him moving, gets him tightening nuts to secure the canvas, gets him climbing up onto the tow truck's bed and sliding underneath the cloth. He accepts a few tires as Cooter shoves them under as well, to make the lump that is Luke less distinct amongst a bunch of other lumps. Because aside from family, there's no one he trusts more than Cooter.

"See you in a while, crocodile. Stay down 'til we're out of town," his friend chirps at him from the other side of the muffling cloth. Luke sneezes in response. "And don't do that, no more, neither. I ain't never gonna be able to convince no one that I got a sick tire."

"Yeah, yeah," Luke mumbles back at him so he'll get going, and he must because there's the vibration of the truck door slamming, and then there's nothing to hear but the grumble of the engine.

Luke knows the bump and sway of town roads better than he knows his own hand. After all, farm work frequently creates new scars and callouses on his hands, but the roads here never change. He can tell when Cooter hits what he can only assume is a roadblock on Elm Street, not a hundred yards from the garage, and he can hear some sort of verbal sparring going on, punctuated by gyus and khees, which means it's Rosco.

"Don't you mess with them tires," he hears, loud and clear, then the sound of Cooter's door slamming. He shifts to the passenger side, biting his lip and hoping that his friend is doing a good job of distracting the law, because the only thing harder to explain than a sneezing tire is one that's crawling, sliding, slipping stealthily, then skulking out through a gap in the canvas. Ducking low and under the truck, handholds in the front axle, feet in the rear wheel wells and watching one pair of black boots and another of grease-stained sneakers make their way around the truck. Waiting until they've gone around both sides and the back, listening to Cooter debate with Rosco up by the passenger side door about whether he wants to search the glove compartment for 'the missing fugitive,' so Luke makes his way over to the driver's side and pulls himself up into the bed and under the canvas again. By the time the sheriff gives up on the search, Luke's safely back to where he started this trip. And the wrecker starts rolling again.

He waits until the bump of the truck proves they're on the dirt surface of State Route 6, headed for Cedar City, before he emerges from under the canvas again. Grabs a towing cable to pull himself upright, squinting against the wind. Holding back a sneeze because even with cables and hooks, the back of a moving tow truck is a pretty precarious place to be. Checks behind to make sure the law isn't playing cat and mouse with him, then makes his way forward to the passenger side door. Opens it, climbs in and plops down on the seat with a sneeze that's punctuated by the thud of the slamming door.

"Told you I had to talk to you," Cooter informs him.

"I reckon I know what you had to say," Luke agrees. "What am I wanted for?"

Cooter laughs; Luke pulls out his handkerchief. Despite the rebellion going on in his nose, he really does feel better today.

"That part ain't entirely clear, buddyroe." It never is. "Used to be grand theft auto, but now I think it's breaking and exiting."

"Breaking and exiting?" That sounds stupid, even for Rosco.

"Well, since you paid the impound fee to get the pickup back, it wasn't quite grand theft. But you broke the fence upon exiting the impound yard, or something like that," Cooter explains.

Luke shakes his head. The charges won't stick, but they'd be enough to keep him out of commission for a while. He doesn't have time to go back and straighten out the crooked sheriff's department right now, not when he's this close to nailing Diane Benson and her damned carnival for what they did to Bo.

"Guess I'm just lucky that Enos wasn't back there at that traffic stop. You might not have been able to keep both him and Rosco from seeing me."

"You ain't got to worry about Enos. Boss fired him."

"What?"

"Yeah, and there's talk of him moving to Los Angeles, too, but that one might have been started by Maybelle." Boss's cousin, who works the switchboard and has excellent overhearing skills. And if those fail her, she's pretty good at making up tall tales, too. "I been too busy to find out for sure. But that ain't your real problem," Cooter informs him. "Your real problem is that Boss and Rosco ain't the only ones that want you."

Luke rolls his eyes, which makes his nose itch. He tries not to, but he ends up sneezing again, this time into the crook of his arm. "Sheriff Little?" Or maybe Sheriff Floyd of Hatchapee, who never has lost too much love for one Luke Duke.

"Nope. According to Maybelle, it's the state cops." Oh, great. Those state boys are professionals all the way. They're not going to fall for any of the nonsense that Rosco does, and Luke's not going to be able to negotiate himself out of any charges either. That only works in Hazzard because the Dukes know enough about Boss Hogg to get him sent to federal prison if they're of a mind to. "But they ain't the ones that are really dangerous. The one you got to look out for is Jesse. He wants you worse than any of the rest."

Luke sighs, coughs, sniffles. "I reckon he's going to have to wait in line like everyone else."

"Yeah, well, he ain't too happy with you disappearing when Bo is in such rough shape." Luke stares hard out the window at the grass and rocks and trees they're passing. "And Bo, he's been asking for you pretty much nonstop. If I didn't figure you'd get arrested the moment you showed up, I'd take you to his hospital room right now myself." Luke turns to look at his friend, even if he figures his face is a little too pink and his eyes a bit too moist. "Don't worry. I'm taking you where you want to go. Just, you'd better have a good reason for all of it."

"I do," he assures them both.

* * *

"Bo Duke," is as riled as it ever has been. "I don't care what you think you were doing," but it's accompanied by an interesting sight. Jesse's finger jutting down at him for only a moment, then getting pulled back. Looks at it like he doesn't entirely trust it not to poke Bo and hurt him all on its own, so he folds it into his hand again. Twice as mad now, for the way his finger almost betrayed him, Jesse picks up where he left off. "You got one responsibility and one responsibility only. And you ain't done none of it, not since you first landed here."

He is, he surmises, still too fragile to be poked, but perfectly healthy enough to be yelled at.

"It's about time you started taking getting better seriously," white eyebrows down low and everything from the widows peak in his hairline to the tip of his nose is a dangerous shade of red. Which is reasonable, in its own way. The old man arrived in the middle of a cacophony of nurses and orderlies that had been getting the overhead frame locked into place again while trying not to pull too hard on his leg. Daisy had been off to the side, silently fuming (still at Enos, thankfully) while the former deputy was acting like a good public servant and keeping Bo stable and steady throughout the process of putting together what he'd nearly torn apart. It had to have looked pretty awful, even if it was just a little body damage to the contraption that's built into his hospital bed (and none of consequence to him). "The only thing I want you to be thinking about," Jesse informs him, "is doing what the docs here tell you to do. You got to stop worrying about Diane and Luke."

Is if such a thing were possible.

(_Letting the General get impounded and nearly crushed was the work of an idiot. Luke would've admitted it, too, if he'd had enough time. But they'd had to go into full-out rescue mode to get their car back, and not a civil word got said during or afterward. They'd fought side-by-side one last time against the thugs in the junkyard, and then it had all come crumbling apart._

_Luke was nothing if not honest. He told it like he saw it – Diane didn't love Bo. Not like his family loved him, not like Luke loved him. She wanted him bad enough, but mostly so he could perform one spectacular task for her over and over again. That wasn't love._

_Love was Luke accepting a punch in the face, maybe. Doling a few out himself, too, but that was just temper or trying to subdue Bo long enough to make him listen. Love was, after they'd beaten each other badly enough that they'd both be sore for days, the upset look on Luke's face when Bo announced he was leaving home. Love was Luke quietly imploring Jesse to stop him from leaving, the words all but lost under Bo's tears and their uncle's gentleness._

_There were some lessons the oldster was willing to let him learn on his own. Luke disagreed with that philosophy, even when he had to stand alone in defense of it. Daisy hadn't wanted the two of them to let Diane get between them, hadn't wanted them to fight. But in the end, she sided with Jesse who sided with Bo. Luke was the only one still fighting him, or maybe it was more like fighting for him. Fighting to keep him safe when Jesse had coddled him and told him to go and do what he what he wanted, and when he was done, he could always come home._)

Now, at last, Jesse's on Luke's side of this thing. Scolding Bo into realizing that he's got responsibilities beyond what he wants to do, and primary amongst those responsibilities is keeping himself safe from harm.

"It's going to take all four of us to plow and plant that back forty come spring." Harvest will just have to go on without him, but that can be managed. Spring planting's always meaner and rougher when a winter's worth of frost means plowing up stones before they can even get to sowing. "So you'd better just start pulling yourself together and getting better."

"Yes, sir." It doesn't help that the room is still crowded with everyone from Shirley the no-nonsense nurse (who might just be forming a quiet crush on his Uncle Jesse even as the lecture proceeds) to Enos, who is hiding in the corner like a scared dog in a thunderstorm.

"Don't you _yes sir_ me." The finger comes out again, gets directed at his chest. "You just close your mouth and do what I tell you," finger gesturing in the air until Uncle Jesse discovers that it's on the loose again. Frowns at its disobedience, then puts it away where it belongs. Hand closed and he considers tucking it into his pocket so it can't escape again, but his faded overalls don't provide room for both belly and fist, so he gives up and drops it at his side. "Do you hear me, young man?"

Bo's eyes trail over to Daisy, whose face, for the first time in days, holds a genuine smile. Oh, it's hidden behind her hand because she's nobody's fool and she's pretty sure she doesn't want a whipping, but Bo knows the lines and curves of her face almost as well as his own. He doesn't need to see the teeth when the eyebrows and cheeks are both lifted. She, like Bo, knows that he's in over his head.

"Mm-hmm?" he tries, what with _yes, sir_ having been disallowed and a nod never having been enough of an answer in his whole life.

Bo tries to stay serious – he can't, after all, run away or even reasonably protect himself if Jesse decides a whipping is in order for unruly boys – but Daisy lets out a giggle. Jesse turns to see her trying to cover it up, but by then it's too late. It is a hospital after all, where contagious diseases run rampant, even the harmless sort like the giggles. Bo cracks his own smile and Enos in the corner lets out one of his nervous little laughs.

"What in tarnation," Jesse starts. Enos goes back to cowering, but Bo and Daisy give up even pretending to have straight faces. There's a mad Jesse, which is a highly volatile situation to be avoided at all costs, and then there's a blustering Jesse, concealing confusion and amusement through an outburst. Enos can't be faulted for not knowing the difference; only family does.

"I believe your children are sassing you, Mr. Duke," Shirley provides by way of explanation. "I wouldn't let them get away with that if I were you."

Jesse's head turns in surprise, eyebrows up like he's only just realized how many witnesses there are to his little tantrum. A wink from Shirley just makes those faded blue eyes pop all the wider.

"No, ma'am," he assures her. "I won't. Are you all about done here?" It might be the first that anyone but him realizes that the hospital staff got done reassembling anything Bo might have knocked out of whack a while ago, and have simply stayed for the show. Guiltily enjoyed it, too, if the sheepish faces Bo can see are any indication.

"Come on, clear out," Shirley orders, trying to save some amount of face in this suddenly compromising situation. As the group shuffles out, the only sounds they dare make are the squeaking of their rubber-soled shoes on the floor and the rustle of their loose uniforms. And then, for the first time since Bo woke up in this room days ago, the door gets closed.

"You mind me, Bo," Jesse says, in case anybody thought that the momentary break in composure meant he was off the hook.

"Yes, sir," he agrees. "I will. But you ain't got to stay here and watch me."

White eyebrows come crashing down again and that finger's close to popping out from where Jesse's been trying to keep it trapped.

"I'll behave," he promises, "as long as I know that you all are out there," he points vaguely toward the window and the parking lot beyond. Oh, well, it's the best he can do, since he's not allowed to get out of bed or even try. "Looking out for Luke. He needs you more than I do."

Jesse rolls his eyes at being told what to do (or maybe just at the way his nephews insist on trying his patience every day of his life) but he pats Bo on the shoulder, says his goodbyes and ushers a still giggling Daisy and a nervous Enos out of the room.

* * *

God, it doesn't help. Not one bit and he never really thought it would, but there it is, anyway. Jacob Sanders sits in front of him, tall, fluffy-haired, attractive. Talking about the way the Carnival of Thrills cruised into town one day and there were posters everywhere the next. A hundred dollar prize dangling before the eyes of any boy with a car and the gumption to think he could drive it. Unlike Bo and Luke, Jacob had beat out a dozen other hopefuls instead of just a few, and none of that is what's got him staring at a colorful, gold-framed picture on the wall that he can't really see very well and doesn't even care about, instead of looking straight at Jacob.

Because the guy sits far too stiffly in the upright chair set on the hardwood floor of his parents' house, pillow supporting his hips and back. And when the notes have all been compared (and sound eerily identical to what happened to Bo and what's happening back in Cedar City right now) and they decide to try to track down the wrecked car that Sanders crashed in, the poor man pulls a cane from where he left it next to the chair, and uses it to hobble along with them as they leave the spacious living room and head out the front door to Zimbra's sedan.

Whatever he thought he was upset about yesterday when he complained that neither of the other drivers was hurt as badly as Bo, he'd just as soon take it back. It doesn't help at all to know that Jacob is still suffering, even if he's expected to make a slow and painful, but complete, recovery.

"Did she offer you an RV on the fairgrounds if you wanted to live closer to work?" Luke asks as he helps the slow-moving man to settle into the passenger seat of Zimbra's car. Seems like going from standing to sitting is a pretty big challenge to the poor guy. _Nothing more than soft-tissue damage_, Jacob had explained about his back. _The doctor tells me that sometimes those are the hardest to treat. _The cast came off his ankle last week._  
_

"No," Jacob answers once Luke and Cooter have climbed into the relatively tight confines of the back seat and Zimbra has taken his unhurried place behind the wheel. For a man that's investigating crashes that happen during stunt driving, Zimbra doesn't know the first thing about how to handle a car. "But I reckon if I'd managed the jump she would have had to. At the time there wasn't really any point in her offering when I had my own apartment in town where she could stay with me when she wanted to get away from the carnival. I had to give up the apartment and move back home with my parents after I got hurt."

"Get away from the carnival?" Cooter asks, because Luke can't bring himself to. Not when he's thinking about Diane staying with Jacob just a couple of months before she started courting Bo. And how she didn't offer him an RV because he didn't have interfering family that she needed to tear him away from.

"Carl, mostly," Jacob explains. "He was always getting on her case about the Leap for Life. Said I'd never make the jump. She said I would be fine and I shouldn't listen to him." The little bit of pride in Jacob's voice at Diane's belief in him disappears with his next words. "Guess Carl was right about that, though."

"Maybe not," Zimbra consoles. "Like I told you, two others failed after you, and we might be able to prove that none of them were accidents, if we look in all the right places."

"I don't know," Jacob says quietly, a hand going back through the waves of his sand-colored hair. Almost the same color as that Bob guy's in Cedar City. Diane definitely likes her men tall and pretty. "I just didn't have the speed. Either me or the car chickened out and I can't say which."

And damn it all, Bo better not be feeling that way. Second guessing his own skills and nerve – they need to figure out what the hell happened, and quick, so he can tell Bo and set him free from all those doubts Jacob has.

"You reckon this thing can go any faster?" Luke calls out to Zimbra. Gets nothing more than a raised eyebrow in the rearview from the man in question, but Cooter's hand is suddenly hot and meaty on his arm. _Calm down, buddyroe_, it says. And maybe also: _you're on probation and you're out of your own county without permission. Lie low._

So he huffs like the little kid he used to be, sits back against his seat with a sniffle that he promises himself is just the last of his cold clearing up, and watches the kudzu-covered trees and telephone poles pass by.

_How's Bo_, he had asked Cooter in the few quiet minutes he'd had with the man after they'd gotten past Rosco's roadblock, but before they'd met up with Zimbra in Cedar City.

Cooter had shrugged. _He keeps asking for you_. Which wasn't an answer, wasn't even close to an answer, and why did that question always meet with that same result? _You should go see him._ He'd tried to figure out how to tease a better answer out of his friend – _will he walk again?_ might have been the most direct question he could ask, but what if the answer was no? And it occurred to him that the reason no one would tell him how Bo was doing was because they didn't want to be the one to give him bad news. So he'd shut his mouth and in a few minutes they'd been in Cedar City with Zimbra anyway. And Cooter had talked himself into joining them on this little trip.

The Jones Brothers' garage isn't particularly large, but it's bigger than Cooter's one-man operation, with more cars in various stages of disrepair strewn up and down its congested wedge of land along Route 22. It doesn't take any effort at all to spot the banged up carnival car, with its bright white paint and garish orange-red flames licking up the quarter panels, not to mention the words 'Leap for Life' on the mostly-intact, passenger-side door.

"There it is, y'all," Cooter says for any of them that might have turned out to be secretly blind, then he's jumping out before Zimbra can diligently set his parking brake. Just look who's in a hurry now.

While the mechanic scuttles over to the car like filings to a magnet, Luke helps Jacob to his feet and Zimbra meets what is presumably one of the Jones brothers in the middle of the lot. The discussion is brief before Jones joins the slower group of them in walking toward the wreck in question.

"It's yours if you want to buy it," he offers. "It's got a good engine in it, mostly just body damage. And it seems to have been abandoned here. The carnival it belongs to is long gone and ain't ever asked after it. We got to wait thirty days before it's ours to sell, but we're way past that, now."

Jacob, standing next to Luke's shoulder, kind of sucks in a deep breath. Whether it's at the thought of how both man and car were abandoned by Diane the minute they were no longer useful, or by the twisted metal of the car he crashed in, Luke doesn't know. Doesn't want to know, so he leaves Zimbra and Jones to deal with him and joins Cooter under the hood.

"Whaddya got?"

"Hard to say, Lukas, hard to say." It's the most relaxed conversation he's had with anyone since before the carnival rolled into town. No one to tell him he's a thoughtless buzz-saw or that he needs to make allowances for Bo for any reason at all. Just two men and the innards of a broken car – the perfect recipe for a fine day. "What did it look like happened to Bo from where you was sitting?" Until Cooter goes and says that.

_I was sitting in the wrong place_, he should just admit. _What I saw was impaired by angle, by the windshield of the pickup, by worry and fear—_

"Looked like he was okay until he hit the ramp or just before, maybe. He didn't have enough forward momentum." Not once he hit the incline, but before that, he was flying far too fast for Luke to stop him.

"Right," Cooter agrees. "So what could make him lose power awful sudden like that?"

"Misfire," Luke offers.

"Nope," Cooter shoots back. "I had that engine tuned to a perfect middle C just an hour before the jump."

"Fuel mixture too lean," he tries, "or too rich."

"Lukas," Cooter scolds. Right. Tuned to a perfect middle C.

"Well, something had to go wrong," he points out. "Something changed in that hour between your tuning and Bo's driving that made the engine misfire or not get enough…" He's nibbling on his lip in that way that used to set Aunt Lavinia to complaining that he'd bite it off someday. "Fuel pump or fuel line!" he announces.

"Fuel line," Cooter echoes his vote. "Check the fuel line in this one," he counsels, stepping back and letting Luke take over under the hood.

"Low grade," Luke notes as he takes a closer look at all the hoses. If something happened to this car it might just have been cheap parts giving out, which will put them back at square one and make this trip so much useless risk. Unless he can find evidence of sabotage—

"Look at that," he says, pulling the line of hose out far enough to show Cooter what he's found. He gets a nice little whistle for his efforts. "Clean slice," he points out.

"That ain't regular wear and tear or even a sudden blow out," his friend confirms. "What you got there is one deliberate cut."

"Could that have happened to the General?" he asks, feels the air around him get crowded as Zimbra leans in to see what they're up to. Jacob's there too, and just look at how the Jones brother who was so eager to sell them this car is sticking his curious nose into the middle of it, too. "In that hour between you tuning him," to a perfect middle C, "and Bo getting in him?"

Cooter shrugs. "Reckon so. When I was done, Diane and Bo went off in one direction and I went off in the other. Wasn't no one watching that car every minute. No way to know for sure, of course, not with the fire damage. But it's possible."

Luke stands up to his full height and checks to make sure no one's head or fingers are in the way before he shoves the crooked hood down until it hits the frame with a loud thunk.

"Good news, Jacob," he says. "It wasn't you that lost your nerve." He gets a wan smile for that, nothing more. "What say we take you home," he offers, "then head back to Cedar City."

This seems agreeable to all parties except for Jones, who's disappointed. Maybe because no one's going to buy the stupid carnival car, or because he doesn't get to know the whole story behind the strangers that happened onto his garage today. Either way, Cooter says a few words to him in that language that mechanics share, something about inventory and trades, which leaves him cheerful enough to wave goodbye.

The sun's slouching its lazy way down toward the horizon by the time they get Jacob safely settled into his parents' home.

"Better let me drive," he suggests to Zimbra about the ride back to Cedar City. Things might get tricky if Rosco or any of the state boys-in-blue are waiting for them anywhere around the county line. The insurance man shrugs gamely and doesn't even argue, something Luke's not used to after a lifetime with Bo Duke. He hardly seems to mind getting relegated to the back seat of his own car when Cooter claims shotgun. He just settles in and closes his eyes.

Which makes it easy, about a half hour into the trip, for Cooter to lean over into Luke's side of the car and quietly ask, "What next, buddyroe?"

Luke shrugs. He's not worried about Zimbra overhearing his plans. "I don't know what y'all are going to do, but I'm going back to the Cedar City fairgrounds and watch Diane like a hawk. Especially in that last hour before the carnival starts. Since we can't prove she sabotaged that car back there," the one she abandoned in Gainesville like so much scrap metal. "Or the General, I got to catch her in the act."

"That ain't until tomorrow, right?"

"Yep."

"So you ain't got no plans for tonight?"

"Other than getting us safely back to Hazzard without any interesting complications, no." Luke checks the rearview to see that Zimbra's eyes have reopened somewhere along the line. He's curious about those complications, all right. Or maybe just fully aware that he's being driven back toward a line of cops by a wanted fugitive. If he doesn't know that much he's a lousy investigator.

"Good, then you can come home with me and get a decent meal, a good night's sleep and a shower." Luke hasn't sneezed in hours, but his nose is pretty well clogged so he has no idea what he smells like. Must be pretty ripe if Cooter's complaining.

"I ain't—"

"No ain't an option, Luke. You're coming home with me."

"Thanks, buddy." He might not feel a whole lot like company, but he could definitely do with a good meal and a comfortable bed.

Zimbra's eyes have closed again and the angled sun's making driving west a misery when Cooter speaks up again, nice and quiet. Steady and not meaning to upset anyone or anything.

"You realize it could have been anyone from the carnival that cut that fuel line, right? It ain't necessarily Diane."

"It was Diane," Luke assures him, then turns the whole of his attention to the road ahead. They might run into trouble and he doesn't want to be distracting himself with a stupid argument with Cooter in case that happens.


	7. Tattle-tale

**7. Tattle-tale**

Quiet but for the dull, repeating thud right next to his right ear. It's what he's wanted, maybe. What he thought he wanted, more like. No one fussing over him, no one patting his head like he's a heifer going through a difficult labor. No one pulling sad faces when they think he can't see them.

The love of family, it's such a mixed blessing. When they're not making the bad times better, they're making the good times worse. There's nothing like family and he wouldn't give them up for anything, but sometimes he just wishes they could be a little less meddlesome.

Thud. Thud. Thud. It's easier to listen to than Daisy's soft voice or Jesse's pep talks disguised as lectures. A lot easier than most of what Luke says, but then again—

If he could have had only one person to see him through all of what he's faced this week, what he'll face for the next several months, it'd be Luke. And Luke's the one person he hasn't seen.

Maybe he has a good guess about what his cousin's been up to, maybe he understands it in a theoretical way. No Duke has ever been quicker to look out for their kin than his the oldest of the kids, no one's ever been as meticulous in seeking retribution for harm done. Jesse's always called it temper, but Bo reckons that if he or Daisy had been old enough to know their parents before they were taken away, if they'd felt the love of Dukes other than each other and Jesse and Lavinia, they'd be just as protective of their remaining kin as Luke is.

But Bo's also pretty sure that, even if they had known the loss of their parents the way same Luke did, he and Daisy wouldn't choose revenge over supporting family. The idiot should have been here, at least now and then.

Thud. It's comforting, maybe. Distracting and it gives his brain something to think about. Up-down-thud. Up-down-thud.

"What do you think you're doing?" Shirley accuses from the doorway.

"Doc Petticord's orders," he defends himself, but she's suspicious. They all are, each of the orderlies with their rigid posture, candy-stripers with their high school pimples and the nurses with their brusque manners – every single one of them that knows about yesterday's tantrum suspects that he's going to stage another breakout attempt at any moment. His (and Luke's) reputation for escaping the law has followed him here and somehow they figure he's going to be able to pull some sleight of hand and go running out of here the second they turn their backs. "Rehab," he explains. "Doc gave me the weight." Which is nothing more than a little barbell weighing maybe five pounds. And all he's doing is lifting it then dropping his hand back down to the bed. "Just to keep me strong."

"Not a bad idea," Shirley admits, bringing her ample and soft body into the room, closer to him. "You're going to be on crutches for a while. Going to need that arm strength. If you're careful, you can do that with your left arm, too. Just curl your fingertips around it and don't jostle that thumb."

He smiles for her, moves the weight from his right hand to his left. Takes him a minute to figure out how to hold it, how to lift with the cast so tight around his arm.

"Dang sick of plaster," he mumbles. Feels bad when he thinks about who he's saying it to. "I mean, I'm grateful to y'all for taking care of me, but—"

Shirley laughs at him, coming close enough to swat his good foot. "Youngster," she informs him, "I'd be worried about you if you weren't sick of plaster by now. I _was_ worried about you for a while there when you didn't seem to care about anything. Here, try this," she adds. "Quit messing with that barbell and push your leg up against my hand." She's got her hand wrapped around his right ankle, where it scratches against his skin. Dry palms, probably from giving so many sponge baths.

He lifts his leg about six inches.

"Keep it straight now," She admonishes. "That's far enough. Now back down."

"I'm also sick of bedpans," he offers. "And I need a real shower, too."

She laughs at him again, pushing down on his leg. She's not very strong, but he makes it look like he's working hard anyway. The way she looks at him with that proud little curl at the corner of her mouth is worth a little deception. Besides, he is just a mite sore after yesterday's acrobatics, so it's not too hard to muster a grimace. "You've got a while before you're getting up out of this bed, any way you look at it. Six weeks in traction, maybe five for a young guy like you. If you behave yourself," she adds with a wink. "Most of our hip fracture patients are a lot older than you."

"Less handsome, too, I bet."

"You just lift that leg," she admonishes. "I won't be flirted with when I am helping you rehabilitate yourself." Oh, but she will, and she knows it. That rosy flush around her gray hairline goes to prove it. "You are in very good shape," she admits. "Body of an athlete. That'll help."

He puts a little more muscle behind the next leg lift. "Used to play football," he explains with all due humility, and a broad smile. "Baseball and even some basketball, back in school. Wrestling, too, though that wasn't official. That was mostly just me against my cousin."

She quits providing resistance, tries to make it look casual and hide the way she flexes her wrist to loosen it up, then swats him on his good calf. "You wrestled that sweet girl? You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

Surprise makes him laugh before sadness catches up with him. Of course, Daisy's the only cousin Shirley knows he has. She's never seen or even properly heard about Luke. "No, my other cousin. Luke. We was all raised by my Uncle Jesse."

"That man is a saint." Funny, she wasn't brave enough to say anything of that nature yesterday when Jesse was pitching a fine fit about Bo's attempt to get out of bed. The sprinkle of red that spreads down to her cheeks goes to prove he was right about her, though. She's pretty well smitten. "Especially if Luke is as much trouble as you are."

"He's worse, ma'am." After all, Bo's just lying here on his back, halfway covered in white, and though he can't see it, he's pretty sure there's a halo over his head. Luke's out there doing Lord alone knows what, holding onto probation by his fingertips while dodging Rosco and the state police. And Jesse's finally out there trying to help or stop him, whichever seems wisest.

"An absolute saint," she assures him. "Come on, give me five more leg lifts before I go." All of her old-lady effort goes to holding him down. "We'll get you wrestling with your cousin again in no time."

Bo can only hope she's right about that.

* * *

"Young man," oh, he knew getting out of Cooter's shower was a bad idea. Of course, at the time he thought more along the lines of wanting to stay in the steam that was clearing his head and making it possible to breathe through his nose for the first time in days. "You just get back in that bedroom back there and you get dressed. Then you and me's going to have a little conversation."

"Yes, sir." Jesse's face is as red as a fire truck, his teeth are bared and the way he leans forward makes Luke have to scoot sideways like a child afraid of a spanking just to get to the bedroom in question.

It was, he has to admit, a good night's sleep that he got in a real bed, in a real house. Not the cleanest – it's Cooter's after all – but well built, outside of town with a reasonable amount of farmland around, so he slept to a serenade of cicadas instead of noisy, overnight diner deliveries and early morning garbage trucks in the alley. Being clean was as nice as being rested and breathing freely. The morning was going along quite pleasantly until he stepped out the bathroom door in nothing more than a towel, warm water turned cold dripping out of his hair and down the back of his neck, to discover that Cooter had tattled on him.

He should have expected it, maybe. He's pretty sure that his friend's intentions were good throughout the day yesterday, including his invitation to stay here. But somewhere between Luke retreating to bed pathetically early last night and emerging from the shower just now, Jesse must have reached out by phone or by CB and threatened Cooter with a whipping if he wasn't honest about Luke's whereabouts. And ever since they were filthy kids getting into playground brawls, his friend's been doing his best to avoid hide-tannings. Give him a barroom brawl ten guys strong and he won't hesitate to jump right in and take the beating of a lifetime, but big, tough Cooter is scared of an old man with a whip.

Once he makes it to the safety of the bedroom, Luke discovers one benefit to Jesse having found him. Clean clothes, from boxers to socks to a fresh handkerchief, are lying on the unmade bed, his three-days-dirty clothes gone to Lord knows where. The incinerator, maybe. Seems as though Jesse wants him neat and tidy before he kills him. This way they won't have to pay a mortician to clean him up afterward. It's all very practical.

When he's properly dressed, he follows his nose to the kitchen to find Daisy up to something that smells an awful lot like pancakes. He'll be well fed for his funeral too. Cooter's standing next to his own stove, poking a spatula at something that sizzles and peering guiltily out from between his bangs and his beard. Hard to know who he's trying to appease – Luke, for having tattled on him, or Jesse, for having kept Luke's whereabouts a secret for so long.

And though the kitchen is plenty small with barely any room for stove, refrigerator and a tiny table with two folding chairs, Jesse's waiting in the middle of it all, calculating exactly how many licks it's going to take to make Luke's apology sound convincing.

"Now, Uncle Jesse," he starts, hands up like he's facing down Rosco's guns. "Before you get started—"

"Started?" the old man echoes back at him. "Started? Boy, you don't know the meaning of started. Your cousin," his uncle tries to point off somewhere in a generally easterly direction toward Tri-County, winds up swatting Cooter on the back of the head. Doesn't look too sorry about it, even if it was an accident. Cooter just rubs his head and keeps his silence. "Is in that hospital yonder, hurt worse than any of you has ever been before, and what have you been doing?"

"Well," he tries.

"You been skulking around, looking for more trouble than this family's already got. Hiding out and acting like a jackass—"

"Now, Uncle Jesse," is his second attempt. Because however he's been acting – and not all of the moments in question were precisely his finest – Jesse's got no call to use the word _jackass_ about it.

"A jackass, Luke. I reckon I know you well enough to know what you been up to. You figure it's your job to see that whoever it is that hurt Bo comes to justice. You figure that if you can see that they get what they deserve – and you'd better be thinking jail time, Luke Duke, not some kind of backwoods justice – then you and Bo will be all square again. Well, you and Bo ain't square again, you never was square. First word out of his mouth when he woke up Saturday night after surgery was your name, did you know that?" No, of course he didn't. "Now it's been a week, Luke. A whole week that he's been in that hospital asking for you. Waiting for you to come and give him some little bit of encouragement, to show him you cared about him. And you ain't showed up once."

"Now, Uncle Jesse—" as someone who's played his fair share of baseball games, he ought to know about three strikes. Besides, he not sure what he plans to say in his own defense. _ I drove past the hospital one night, but I didn't stop in because I didn't know his room number_?

"And," Jesse adds, advancing. Making Luke take a step back, which is just not smart in Cooter's house. Never know when you might trip over a wanton carburetor or leftover radiator from some long-dead car. "Now you sound like you're sick, so even if you wasn't in trouble with the law I couldn't take you to see Bo. He's doing better, by the way, but he ain't totally out of the woods as far as possible infection goes. Not that it matters because you _is_ in trouble with the law and do you have the first idea how selfish you are? We's already stretched to the limit trying to take care of your cousin and all his medical needs, and you go disappearing and making us worry about you, too? You ought to be ashamed of yourself." They've backed up out of the kitchen and halfway across the living room. He should be grateful, at least, that Daisy and Cooter can't see how utterly wretched his face must look by now. Jesse's both the prosecution and the judge, but Luke's his own jury of one. Guilty of being a jackass. Case dismissed.

"I'm sorry, Uncle Jesse," he says, and means it more than he ever has in his life, even that one time he nearly beaned Bo with his Louisville slugger.

"Sorry don't cut it, Luke. Now, you got to fix this thing. You got to get J.D. off your tail so you can go to Bo. After you make things right with him, you can go off to prison," this is the part where he has to bite his tongue to keep from snickering. Because Jesse's perfectly serious, at least right now. Later, when he's calmed down, he'll realize just how ridiculous that suggestion is, and he might or might not laugh. But if Luke cracks up now, the lecturing will start all over again, and they don't have time for that. "If that's what you want to do."

"It ain't what I want to do," doesn't entirely succeed in being dead serious, but he makes up for it by getting to the meat of the situation, double time. "But I got a way to get Boss Hogg to let up, at least I hope so. If you and Daisy will help."

"I'm listening," Jesse says, still mad enough to spit. Luke can only hope that it's the law his uncle ends up spitting at.

"What time is it?" As far as he remembers, his watch was in his jeans pocket. Thing is, that pair of jeans has gone missing.

"About nine, sugar," Daisy calls from the kitchen, proving that Cooter's house is not only small, it's also an echo chamber. Nothing that gets said in one room is safe from being overheard in another, even if they're at opposite ends of the house. Which is just as well, for now. He needs everyone to hear what he's got to say.

"Okay, we got to eat breakfast and get moving pretty quick. At least me and Cooter do. You and Daisy can take your time a little bit. I need you to collect Rosco and Boss and bring them to the Cedar City Fairgrounds. But make sure you don't bring none of them state boys with you."

"That'll be easy," Daisy calls. "Boss had Rosco call in the state cops, but them state boys wasn't too impressed with the supposed case against you, which is really just breaking the fence to the impound yard, so they only sent two guys. And them two ain't so much interested in catching you as they are in seeing what they can catch down there at Catfish Pond."

"Two?" he asks, and any semblance of seriousness is gone. "Two? No wonder we didn't run into none of them last night," comes out in a full-throated laugh.

"It ain't funny," Jesse informs them all, because Daisy and Cooter are snickering right along with him. "All it takes is one of them state boys to get you in custody and Lord knows what it might take to get you free again. So you just get serious and tell us what you need us to do and when."

"Yes, sir," he agrees.

* * *

He sent Jesse and Daisy away. He can admit that. Sent them to help Luke instead of hovering over him, and he doesn't miss the hovering. Not much, not really. But helping Luke should have taken a few hours, or maybe overnight and barely past dawn, because there was finding Luke first and helping him second. So he figures that somewhere around ten or so in the morning, his family ought to have been back here, laughing about Rosco's cruiser sinking into the mud the bottom of the Hazzard Pond yet again, or bragging about the chain of cars they lined up to force some bad guy off the road and make him confess.

(Some bad guy, indeed. It hasn't escaped Bo's memory that it's Diane that Luke's probably set his sights on. And he hasn't forgotten that the woman hasn't even taken the time of day to send him a get well card. But he can't bring himself to believe that Diane is the real bad guy here. As far as he can figure, she's just a jerk, a clod. Someone not all that different from Luke, really, with her eyes on the wrong prize.)

No matter the nature of the stories, how tall they may end up growing, his kin should be here by now. He's not at all comforted by the fact that the man darkening his doorstep is not Luke or Jesse or even Cooter, but Enos.

"Hey Bo, buddy, how're you feeling?"

Anxious, lonely, worried – pretty much like a fool.

"I'm okay," he says because bypassing the small talk is more of an imperative than complaining. "What's the word on the street?"

"Word on the street?" Enos echoes, that wide, confused smile on his face. Wearing brown today and it makes him look dull, like he could blend into the hospital's walls. In fact, the chair he pulls up to Bo's bedside to sit in is almost exactly the same shade as his corduroy pants.

"What's going on out there," Bo explains, jerking his good thumb toward the window and the parking lot beyond, just to keep Enos from saying that the word on the street is SCHOOL CROSSING, and then launching into a story about how Charlie, the steady-handed road worker, painted it there last month. "In Hazzard?"

"Oh, I wouldn't know about that, Bo. Being as I left Hazzard this morning. I'm on my way to the airport to catch a plane to Los Angeles."

"You're leaving?" Now? When Luke and Daisy all of Hazzard might just need him most?

Enos reaches out, makes like he's going to touch Bo's forehead as a test for fever. Must have second thoughts about that, because he pulls his hand back and sets it awkwardly into his own lap. "I told you I got a job in Los Angeles, Bo. Just yesterday. Remember? Daisy was mad at me."

"I remember," he says, waving off any other recollection of the day. "I just didn't think you'd be gone so soon." But Boss fired him, so even if he was back in Hazzard, there's not a lot he could do to help Bo's family.

"Well, I just come to spend a few minutes with you before I got to go for real. Daisy was supposed to take me to the airport, but she called on the CB this morning and said something real important had come up," Enos lets out a high-pitched, tight little laugh at this, only one ha. It's a brave attempt to stay cheerful in the face of what must feel like rejection, and Bo admires his effort, but in truth it's nothing but sad. "So I had to borrow my folks' car and Daisy says she and Cooter'll go to the airport lot and pick it up later, then take it back to my folks." Because Enos' parents don't drive anywhere further than the General Store in Hazzard Square, not since his father had a stroke a few years back.

"Did she say anything else?"

"Just that she was sorry and that she'll try to find a way to come out and see me sometime. Which I can't hardly see how she'll be able to do when y'all got harvest and then—"

"Nothing about Luke?" he interrupts. Knows he shouldn't, heck, he's been wanting company all day and being rude to the one person who has seen fit to visit with him isn't exactly smart.

"Nope, she didn't say nothing about Luke. Why, do you figure he's in trouble?" Well, only because Enos told him that the state police had been called in on a manhunt for his cousin. Otherwise no, he pretty much figures Luke can handle himself. "If you want, I can go back to Hazzard. I mean, I'd miss my flight, but I guess I can get another one if you really need me to, Bo." Such an earnest man, generous beyond anything Boss could ever tolerate and it's no wonder he got fired. He's got to be an endless puzzle to the commissioner, who has never understood a single selfless gesture in his life.

As tempting as it is to send Enos off to help his kin, he can't do it. Not when he doesn't even know if they're really in trouble. He did send most of his family away, anyway. And Luke hasn't been here since the day Bo arrived, so his absence could mean anything (or nothing) at all.

"No, Enos," he forces a smile, but there are tears behind it. He's going to miss his friend more than he can say. "You just go on and get yourself to that airport. Los Angeles is waiting for you." (Los Angeles has no idea what it's gotten itself into.)


	8. Rehabilitation, Duke Boy Style

**8. Rehabilitation, Duke Boy Style  
**

He's left a string of helpful family and friends behind him, all with careful instructions that he's sure will be followed at least passably well. Jesse's "bringing" Boss and Rosco, which means he's got to get himself chased first. That part's easy enough – just go back to the alley behind Cooter's, fetch the pickup that's been sitting there since yesterday morning (with the keys still in the ignition, apparently, since he never did find them in his pockets) and drive fast enough that the law can't tell whether its Luke or Jesse behind the wheel.

Daisy's at Drakes Corners, ready to cut off any state boys that might join the chase. If there aren't any troopers, she's just going to follow along behind Boss and Rosco, and keep them corralled like unruly livestock.

Cooter's taken up residence at that hole in the chain link fence, with orders to keep Boss and Rosco occupied until he hears Luke's bobwhite call. Then he's supposed to move everyone, quickly and quietly, toward the sound so they can join him in catching Diane in her rotten little act of sabotage.

Zimbra – well Zimbra he would have liked to have left in his car, parked in the same colorful stand of trees they've been using all along. The investigator's been pretty dogged so far, but at this point he's an unknown element in a plan that's got to go off like clockwork. But though he's more hindrance than help, he's insisted on staying by Luke' side, saying something about needing to see what happens with his own eyes.

Which, so far, hasn't been much of anything. It took the two of them a while to spot the carnival's top show car, the one that Diane's latest sucker of a stunt driver has been using for practice runs. Now that they've found it, they've been lingering around the edges of a nearby hotdog stand, keeping an eye on it for far too long. Trying to pass as early arrivals and Luke could manage it alone, but in his usual form, Zimbra's come dressed in a gray suit, including vest and tie. He couldn't blend in at a businessman's convention – heck they probably dress more casually there – but Diane's never met him so even if he's the sorest thumb on the entire fairgrounds, at least he can risk being seen. Luke's got to keep himself utterly hidden.

He adjusts the angle Cooter's too-small ball cap, which sits awkwardly on his head and is probably slicking gobs of grease into his hair. It was the closest thing to a disguise they could find on short notice. He bites into the hotdog he bought as the other half of his disguise and watches the car.

So far, nothing is playing out like Cooter says it did with Bo. There's no one – not a mechanic or the driver himself, checking over the car from engine to trunk to make sure it's in perfect condition for the jump. Makes him second guess his earlier logic that the last hour before the show would be the time to get Rosco here. If it's the fuel line that's going to be cut, it can't happen too early or else the drizzling leak will empty the tank, leaving too little fuel to get the car started. But there are so many ways to sabotage a car and it could have happened hours ago—

Or not. Here comes Diane, and in tow she's got the guy who could, as long as Luke squints really hard, pass for Bo's twin. He moves toward the back of the hotdog shack to better shelter himself, but he might as well have stayed out in the open for all that anyone's paying him any attention. Zimbra's leaning against the shack in full view, pulling on his pipe, while the stunt guy runs a nervous hand along the hood of the car. Diane says something to him, distracts him with a few kisses. Rubs his upper arms through that shiny white coverall he's wearing, and—

Suddenly Luke has to throw the rest of his hotdog away into the nearest garbage barrel, while his mind gets flooded with seasick memories of the same sort of coverall, singed and bloody, being cut away from Bo's body by emergency workers in the back of a shrieking ambulance. _Bo, hang on_ – those were his only clear thoughts then and they come back to him now, as he mentally asks Bo to hang on a little longer until Diane can be brought to justice. Heartbeat in his ears, breath short as he peers around the edge of the shack one more time. Zimbra, it seems, has also taken cover somewhere, and that's one small mercy.

Diane lets go of her latest quarry long enough for him to reach through the open driver's window and pop the hood, then she stands at his shoulder as he looks the engine over. Neither of them seems to touch anything at all before the guy slams the hood shut again and they amble off, arm in arm. Maybe nothing's going to happen after all.

But – _damn it_ – just as Carl comes strolling across the grounds in the general direction of the now abandoned car, trying to look casual about how he does it, Luke can hear the bellowing of a poorly trapped Hogg. Announcing what he's going to do once he gets his hands on that dangerous Duke boy that mangled his fence.

_Puuuu-tueet!_ Luke lets loose his bobwhite call, not to bring them closer, but to get Cooter's attention, and just maybe to cover up some of Boss's words. A shouting voice so soon before a carnival is not all that unusual, and maybe Carl won't notice it, so long as he doesn't hear the name Duke. _Puuuu-tueet!_

He spares a look back at the grandstand, holds up his hand to signal Cooter to stop the forward march. Watches just long enough to see his friend grab Boss by the sleeve and dig his heels into the dust. Meanwhile, Jesse and Daisy are talking fast and furiously to Rosco. There's nothing more Luke can do about it, so he turns back to see Carl, so busy acting nonchalant that he looks neither right nor left, striding in his stiff-legged limp toward the show car. It's good to know that even if Boss and Rosco won't stick to the plan, at least Carl seems like he's going to. He's a man on a mission.

_Not yet, not yet, not yet_, Luke thinks. Thinks it as hard as he can, but he has to remind himself that none of the people that surround him are Bo. They're not going to follow silent commands, and some of them wouldn't even follow loud ones. _Not yet_, even though Carl's gotten to the car now. It's not enough. _Not yet_, but he puts a finger to his lips, turns to Cooter and the rest of the gang, motions them forward with his other hand. Hopes that they're smart enough to keep to the shadows and creep carefully. _Not yet_, when Carl mimics Romeo's move and leans his shorter frame into the car to release the latch. _Not yet, not yet_, because standing over a car with an open hood doesn't make him guilty of anything worse than checking an engine, and if that's a crime, all of Hazzard belongs behind bars. _Not yet, not ye_—

Damn. Carl looks both ways to be sure he won't be spotted and freezes. Spots something (probably fat and white in nature), turns his head quickly to look for an escape and that's when Luke charges him.

The fool runs, as though he has half a chance of escaping when one of his legs doesn't work as well as the other. He's got a head start, maybe he has delusions of how far he can get, maybe he means to find himself somewhere to hide. Too late, Luke's on him before he can even make it to the grassy infield of the grounds. Tackles him on dirt and loose rock, lands hard but if it's not exactly comfortable, and least he's got Carl to cushion him. Oomph of air going out of both of their lungs, sharp pain in his knee, scraped hands, but none of that matters nearly as much as sitting back, turning the man over to face him, raising a fist with intent to ring his bell and give him a concussion that'll make Bo's seem like a minor headache in comparison. Shaky hands come up in surrender, but Luke can just about feel the vibration of the punch in his arm, crunch of knuckles, blood sticky on his hand, with no way to know whether it's his or Carl's, but at least it's not Bo's and—

None of that can happen, of course. _Do you have the first idea how selfish you are?_ Jesse nags in his head. _A whole week Bo's been in the hospital, asking for you. And you ain't showed up once._ A week could turn into ten years in a heartbeat and he won't have a legal leg to stand on if Rosco sees him pound the tar out of Carl now. This right here is assault and battery, and the only offense anyone saw the fool commit was opening the hood of a car that belongs to the carnival, then looking inside.

He brings his fist down to his side, drops his chin to his chest. Climbs off Diane's henchman, grabs him by the shirt front, and hauls him to his feet.

"Thank you for not hitting me," Carl says, his voice weak and wobbly. Both of them still trying to catch their breath.

"I didn't do it for you," Luke assures him.

"Well, thank you all the same," Carl repeats with the kind of sincerity that comes from making the fairly reasonable assumption that if Luke had hit him, it would have been extraordinarily painful. Brushes dirt off his shirt and jeans, discovers a scrape on his arm but must decide it's not important.

Luke gets him by the elbow, leading him toward the knot of family and law that Zimbra's doing his best to bring up to speed in the shade of the hotdog shack. The whole tangle of them is about to run roughshod over the lightly-built investigator, and then there is a small but curious crowd forming on the outskirts of the concession area.

"I could still hit you, you know," Luke offers. "But if you tell them people up there," he points to Rosco and Boss in particular, "what you was about to do, I'll leave you to them. They don't hit near as hard. Mostly they just talk a lot." And wield handcuffs, but Carl already knows that. He's met them before.

"I'll say whatever you want me to," the coward answers him. Not that it surprises him; hell, instead of fighting Bo openly, this weasel attacked the General behind everyone's back. And at least a few cars before that, one of which left Jacob Sanders questioning his abilities behind the wheel and—

Luke's considering hitting him all over again. Needs to calm himself down, needs to do this right.

"You'll tell them the truth. That's all you got to do." They've reached their destination.

"Luke Duke," Boss starts blustering.

"Now J.D., you just hush up," Jesse intercedes, and Luke ignores everything else, other than depositing Carl in front of Rosco Coltrane, who likes to remind them all that he's the duly constituted law of these parts.

"Sheriff," he says, talking over the poor man's ijits and wijits and threats to cuff and stuff everyone within a thirty foot radius. "I reckon you know Carl, who helps run this here carnival. And Carl's got something he wants to say to you." He stares hard at the man in question, silent warning that he still stands ready to dole out a beating and he's not afraid to do it in front of Rosco, either. But Carl's too busy staring at the dust on his shoes to notice. "About what I just stopped him from doing." A little jostle of his arm to prompt him, nothing more than a friendly shake, at least from a legal standpoint. Carl might not see it the same way.

"I was going to cut the fuel line in that car back there," he mumbles.

"What do you mean, cut the fuel line?" Luke prompts. Boss and Rosco barely scratch together a three-digit IQ combined; best to spell it all out carefully.

"I mean," Carl says testily, "I was about to use my jackknife to cut a slit in the fuel line of that car, so that when Diane's latest boyfriend went to use it for the Leap for Life stunt, he wouldn't make it."

"When he'd go to floor it," Cooter jumps in to offer his mechanical expertise, "a lot more gas would hit the ground than would make it to the carburetor. So he wouldn't have enough power to get the speed he'd need to make the jump. He'd crash."

"Like Bo?" Daisy asks, because Luke hasn't told her or Jesse anything other than their role in the plan. That way, if it turned out he was wrong, they wouldn't have to feel the bitter sting of disappointment. At least that was what he told himself at the time. "Did you cut the General's fuel line?" she demands.

Funny how Carl's been so nicely obedient when he was afraid of Luke's fists, but now that it's a woman hollering at him, his head comes up and his mouth gets to moving again. "That boy was in over his head. He was so full of himself, wouldn't listen to reason—"

_Whap!_ The waterfall of words quits flowing the second Daisy's hand collides with Carl's face. He turns to Luke, read splotch in the shape of a hand rising on his cheek. Luke just shrugs back at him.

"I said _I_ wouldn't hit you if you told the truth. I didn't say nothing about Daisy." Which isn't much fair, and he knows it. Daisy's got a mean slap when she wants to. But she's small and female, so she'll never get hauled off to jail for assault and battery. "Well, ain't you going to arrest him, Rosco?"

"On what charge?" the sheriff snaps. He came here, after all, with intent to arrest Luke, and he's notoriously slow when it comes time to change gears. Usually has to grind them for a while, maybe burn out his clutch along the way.

"The charge is attempted murder," Zimbra intones in that nasal voice of his. "You can list me as the complainant."

"Well, gyu," Rosco says, looking from Zimbra to Luke to Jesse to Boss to Daisy, trying to figure out which of them he's most scared of at the moment. It may take a while, but when he figures it out, that's who he'll take orders from. "I don't, I, he, who're you?" he demands of Zimbra.

"I'm your complainant," Zimbra reminds him. "You know, the one filing the complaint. Name's John Zimbra and – would you like a pen to write all this down?" Zimbra offers, fingers dipping into his inside breast pocket.

"No I wouldn't, you just, you keep your hands when I can see them. I don't need no complain—compel—comment—I don't need no pen or nothing else," the sheriff insists. "I've got, I've got to, I've—"

"Oh, Rosco," Boss's nose wrinkles with utter disgust. "Just arrest him," he says, waving an indignant hand in the approximate direction of Carl.

The handcuffs come out, but the mouth doesn't stop. It just gets a little quieter, mumbling something about how he knows what his job is and he doesn't need any marshmallows telling him what to do.

"Carl?" comes the harassed and annoyed call from where the car stands, its hood still open in accusation. "What's going on here officer?" It's Diane, her blonde hair swinging as she makes her way toward the group. The stunt driver stays behind, staring into the engine compartment of the car. "We've got a show in less than an hour. Whatever's going on here, I'm sure we can straighten it out afterward."

"I wouldn't plan on doing any show, young lady," Zimbra informs her.

Luke turns back to Carl. "What about Diane?" he asks.

The idiot looks at him dumbly, like he has no idea what Luke's talking about. The powerful urge to hit him resurges; it takes everything in Luke to hold it at bay.

"What about Diane telling you to cut that fuel line?" he insists. Daisy takes a step forward, eyes squinted at the woman in question.

"Diane?" Carl asks, his voice high with confusion, that handprint on his face growing an ever deeper shade of red. "She didn't have anything to do with any part of this."

* * *

"Diane didn't have nothing to do with it," Luke finishes, his voice a little pinched, but Jesse's already explained that his cousin's getting over a cold. "Carl swore that up, down and sideways."

Better late than never, Bo figures, about all of it. Luke finally putting in an appearance in his hospital room, Jesse and Daisy coming back after having been gone for close to two days, the explanations about where they've been and what they've been doing, the proof that the crash that put him in here wasn't his fault.

"Boss really thought he was going to get Diane's carnival from her," Daisy explains. "Which it seems like he's been wanting all along. But since she wasn't guilty of nothing and she'd paid him in full for renting the Hazzard Fairgrounds, there wasn't nothing he could do. It made him madder'n a trampled rattlesnake. And then when the state cops told him he had no real case against Luke either, well, I thought he was going to swallow his cigar."

They're all clustered around his bed, frequently talking over each other in their eagerness to tell him the tale. Daisy and Cooter are at his left side, Jesse's at the iron railing that runs along the foot of the bed, and Luke's right here by his good side. It's kind of reminiscent of those nights running moonshine – after a good run, friends and family would gather on the porch, and the tale telling would begin. About how many revenuers had been chasing them this time, and where a search party might be needed come dawn. Lost revenuers from here to the swamp and the tales would get taller with the telling. Yep, could be any night out of five years ago, except for the fact that they're in a brightly lit hospital room and they're talking openly without any concern as to who might overhear them. Well, that and the fact that he's flat on his back, listening rather than telling. Plus, it's Sunday morning, not Saturday night. And instead of him and Luke being on the same side of the stories, they're miles apart.

All of them look tired, though Jesse insists that they got a good night's sleep last night. But Luke's more than tired, more than dealing with the tail end of a cold. He's distracted, upset, staring at the frame that keeps Bo's leg extended, then studying the cards that have overtaken the bedside table and are creeping up the walls. He's focusing himself anywhere but at Bo.

And none of them are in their Sunday best. "Ain't y'all planning on going to church?"

Jesse's eyebrows lift at the suggestion. It's not like Bo proposes going to church terribly often. Usually he's content to miss a Sunday or two.

"Thought we'd stay here and keep you company," appears to be the excuse.

"Oh, well, don't worry none about that," Bo tells them. "Y'all run on home and get gussied up and go." Jesse's got that look like maybe he wants to get the doctor in here to see whether Bo's recently concussed brain has been damaged worse than they originally thought. "Luke'll stay here and keep me company, won't you, Luke?"

His cousin makes a few surprised noises like he's been known to do when he realizes that he's about to get pounded into the ground by a giant in the middle of a barroom brawl. Jesse's got that look that suggests Luke needs a morning in church and some quiet time to reflect on his many sins more than any of the rest of them. There's that cold, too, which Jesse's been fretting over, even though Doc Petticord pronounced it nothing to worry about. But in the end, Bo's the one with a cast up to his hip and the face of a sad puppy, so Jesse and Daisy check their watches and start heading for the door. Cooter stands exactly where he has been all along until Jesse calls for him to get a move on. A whine comes out of the mechanic's throat, but he drags his heels out the door anyway.

Bo waits until the click of Daisy's heels is fading down the hallway, then he catches his cousin's hand. "Luke," he says so the man will look at him. Because back in those moonshine running days, he would have had an arm around Luke's shoulders and the two of them would have been checking each other's faces for exactly how tall they were willing to let the tale get. But since he walked in the door to this room for the first time a half hour ago, Luke hasn't touched him or even looked directly at him, like he's afraid that even that little will break Bo worse than he's already broken. "Ain't none of this your fault."

Luke has a hundred arguments against that notion – it's clear in the way his hand stiffens in Bo's, the way he nods, like a brave little soldier facing his doom. But he's not going to voice any of them, because Bo's an invalid and clearly that means he's not fit to be disagreed with.

"Sit," he commands. He lets go of the hand in his so Luke can fetch the plastic chair from the edge of the room, then pull it up to Bo's bedside. A lifetime of standing side-by-side and Luke knows the exact length of Bo's reach, so he sits just outside of it. "Come closer," Bo insists. Luke sighs, complies. Kind of slouches like he is resigning himself to being touched when he doesn't want to. Bo leaves that alone for now. "This," he says, lifting up his left hand and showing off the cast. So far it's got Cooter's, Daisy's and Enos' signatures on it, along with a smattering of candy stripers' phone numbers scrawled across it in blue marker. Jesse announced that writing on casts was foolish and refused, but then again, he's the one who went down to the gift shop to get the pen. "Is a broken thumb. It's called a Bennett's fracture," he adds, showing off his newly acquired medical knowledge. Luke always does better when he has concrete facts, clear knowledge and understanding. "There ain't nothing wrong with the rest of the arm. It's just in a cast because that's how they keep the thumb immobilized so it'll heal right."

Luke's nodding, staring at the cast and otherwise keeping quiet.

"This thing," he says, pointing to metal contraption that runs over his head the length of the bed, "is called a Balkan Frame." Luke stares up at the pulleys and cables, probably already figuring out exactly how it works. Bo hasn't asked about that, but it seems like a pretty simple system of pulleys and weights. "It's to make sure that the breaks in my leg are properly aligned. Especially the top one, which is way up in my hip." And has a typically weird sounding medical name that sounds like intro-something. "The other two breaks in my femur," with an equally dumb medical name, sub-something, "have a rod inserted."

"For stability," Luke agrees, with a nod. "That's why they did surgery on you that first day."

"Right," Bo says, and his voice must betray some amount of confusion.

"I was here," Luke explains, looking him right in the eyes for the first time since he got here this morning. "Before they took you into surgery."

Bo nods and offers a little smile to him. He wants to do more, wants to hug him or something because he didn't know that Luke stayed with him, had begun to doubt that he'd really heard Luke's voice right after the crash after all. But his cousin's barely looking at him; he's nowhere near ready to be touched.

"The last break is down in my lower leg. I got lucky," or that's what they've told him, anyway. "That it was only the one bone that broke," the tibia, but not the fibula, "but I was unlucky in that the broken end cut through my skin." Luke winces at that. "They were worried about infection, so they didn't cast that right away. But a couple of days ago they decided I was doing all right, so they've got the cast all the way down now. It's very stable. But I've still got this," he says, looking at the IV that got moved from his right arm to his left, just above the cast, a few days back, so he could have full mobility of his good arm without worrying about dislodging it. "Full of antibiotics, just in case."

Luke's nodding, looking at where the needle has been poked into Bo's vein. Which is more than Bo likes to do; he can look at his broken leg just fine, but he's not a big fan of anything stuck under the surface of his skin.

"The bruising on my chest is healing, and there ain't no signs of my concussion anymore, though Cooter's been saying that they can't tell the difference between my normal brain damage and whatever might have happened during the accident."

Luke's looking at him now, hand coming up like maybe he's going to push Bo's hair back from his eyes. Doesn't, just sort of grazes the backs of his fingers against the skin of his shoulder, then drops his hand back down to rest on the bed. Eyes so blue and so sad. It's Luke that should have been teasing Bo that way, the look says. "I'm sorry," his cousin mumbles, and there's no telling what he means by it, so Bo lets it go.

"Point is," the main thing is, Luke has initiated touch, and that's progress. "I'm going to make a full recovery. Doc says I'll be fine and there ain't nothing I could do before that I won't be able to do again, in time. And," because this is the important part, "with help. I got to rehabilitate."

"All right," Luke agrees, with a solid nod. His cousin thrives on plans of action.

"Now Shirley – she's the day nurse on weekdays – she's been trying to help me, but she ain't very strong. So I need a partner that ain't going to go easy on me and ain't afraid of hurting me, neither." _I need you._

Here comes a genuine smile from Luke, who never has needed him to say all the words. "Then let's get to work," he says.

* * *

"You're cheating."

Well. A man could take that kind of insult to his honor personally.

"I am not," Luke fires back.

This is rehabilitation, Duke boy style. Bo's plan at this point is just to maintain the strength of muscles in his good leg and arm, to do what he can to keep some strength in his abdominal muscles without risking additional injury to his hip and, oh, yeah. To exercise his tongue muscle as much as possible.

Luke, who has been coerced into coaching kids' baseball and football more than once, and has furthermore survived not only boot camp, but deployment with the Marines, has designed his exercise plan.

Which tidily explains why they are arm wrestling with their right elbows propped on Bo's mattress, Bo lying on his back with his arm parallel to his body, Luke sitting on a flimsy hospital chair that keeps threatening to slide out from underneath him.

"All you got to do," Luke says through gritted teeth, trying not to let on how winded he's getting, "is pin my arm to your chest. Me, I got to pull you all the way off the bed if I'm going to win."

"That don't matter none when instead of keeping still, you keep moving all over the place."

"And _I'd _be just as happy if you didn't pull him off the bed anyway," comes that high, thin voice from the doorway.

"Hi, Doc Petticord," Bo says, grinning while he tries to take advantage of Luke's surprise. Works about as well as any Bo Duke plan ever has, which means it fails.

"Hi, Doc," Luke echoes.

The doctor steps fully into the room, stands at the foot of Bo's bed. He's small enough that Bo's traction frame doesn't block his view at all. When Luke's down there, he has to stoop if he wants to look at Bo's face.

"How are you feeling, Bo?" the doc asks.

"Like I can whip Luke's tail," Bo says, taking his lip between his teeth. Luke would warn him not to do that for risk of biting it off, but he can't. Not when his own tongue is between his teeth.

It's a sad world when the Duke boys are reduced to chewing on their own faces. Still, his tongue and Bo's lip are tastier and probably more nutritious than the food he bought down in the hospital cafeteria this morning. The last three mornings he has risen earlier than usual, gotten his chores done before dawn, then brought a thermos of coffee to drink in Jesse's pickup as he's driven to the hospital. It's only Wednesday, but thus far there seems to be a tacit schedule worked out in the family, whereby Luke does morning rehab with Bo, then brings the pickup back to Hazzard so Jesse can spend part of the afternoon at the hospital, then they trade places again so the Duke boys can do some more exercises before Luke gets kicked out at the end of visiting hours. Daisy goes to see Bo whenever she can, between work shifts, and Jesse and Luke alternate chores to keep the farm running.

Luke's not willing to give up his mornings with Bo, but it does seem a shame to be using good money to buy bad food, when there's an awfully nice breakfast being cooked at home. (Then again, it's the two hundred fifty dollars Diane gave Bo as a down payment on Luke's half of the General that's getting spent. Good riddance to bad money.)

"Your color's better," Doc remarks. "How about pain?"

Luke's left hand comes up to hold both of their right ones in a steady grip, forcing a pause in play. He wants an answer to this question, too, and isn't about to accept a fib in the guise of arm wrestling trash-talk.

"It's mostly okay."

"What does that mean?" Luke prompts. Bo shoots him a dirty look, but Doc Petticord's right there, his hand scratching at the white roughness of his beard and waiting for the answer, too.

"Sometimes my hip gets to bothering me, especially at night. But I can handle it."

"Boy," Doc lectures, "pain ain't something to be handled or ignored. It's a signal that something's wrong. You feel pain, you tell someone. You understand me?"

"Yes, sir." Bo's nothing if not well-mannered.

"Now, I reckon we might want to adjust the tension a little bit, especially at night. I'm going to leave instructions to give that a try. And then I want you to be honest with Luke in the morning about whether it helped or not. I'm going to be checking with him." Because that's the way it has worked all their lives. Bo avoids medical treatment by pretending to be fine, and Luke gets sent in as the snitch who will find out the truth.

"Yes, sir," Bo says again.

"Now, you two boys be careful with that 'rehabilitation' you're doing. I don't want to be back in here setting Luke's bones, too."

That cocky grin spreads across Bo's face and Luke turns their hands loose with an answering smirk.

"And watch that IV line," the doc says on his way out the door.

Bo's hand presses against his like he really thinks he can win this thing. Well. Luke's just going to have to teach him a lesson or two.


	9. Two Duke Boys, Zero Patience

**9. Two Duke Boys, Zero Patience  
**

"Give me five more, Bo. Come on, five more."

He wanted this. Heck, every day for a week he asked after Luke, pined for his cousin, missed him. But now that Luke's been aggressively rehabilitating him for the past six days, he'd be reasonably happy if one of those alligators down in the Yuchee Swamp decided to eat his cousin. Or maybe just that right arm of his, the one that's using far too much of its strength to provide resistance against Bo's tired leg.

"That's enough, Luke." It really is. It's his leg, he ought to know. "I don't want this one so strong that the other one can't keep up with it."

Luke's lips press together and his head shakes. Clear dismissal of Bo's concerns, clear dismissal of Bo's intelligence. "It's only five."

"Well, then it's only five that won't get done." It stands to reason (or at least to Bo's reason) that if five is a trivial number to do, it's also a trivial number to skip.

"Bo," has that sound of lost patience, but that's okay. Bo lost his a while back, so that makes them even – between the two of them, they have zero patience.

"Luke," he snaps right back.

"Hi, y'all!" comes from the door and Luke turns his head to see who's there. Doesn't move his body which blocks the view of the door from the bed, so Bo has no idea who has just greeted them. He lifts his good leg, which his cousin is now only holding onto lightly, and kicks Luke in the hip so he'll move. It works well enough, but the glare he gets as a result threatens that he's not so badly hurt that Luke won't retaliate later.

"That's one," Bo says with forced cheer. "Now I only go to do four more. And hi, Cletus." Because that's who has come to visit him today. "You look funny."

Cletus steps fully into the room, straightens his clothes and puffs out his chest. Which only makes his coat ride up again. "Think Daisy will like it?" he asks.

"What," Luke says with a hard-edged laugh. Oh, he's still plenty annoyed with Bo, but not so much that he can't take a minute to poke fun at Cletus. "That costume?"

"Is it cotillion time already?" Bo adds. It would be a shame if it was. He always enjoys a good cotillion. Especially when the girls arrive in their short and shiny costumes.

"No it ain't cotillion time, and this ain't a costume. I'm the new temporarily-sworn, acting, for-now, provisionarily-constituted deputy of Hazzard County!" Cletus announces with the kind of pride that goes to prove that he doesn't know the meaning of half those words he said. Or is just desperate enough to be willing to take what he can get.

"Well, congratulations, Cletus." Luke offers his hand for the shaking.

"Yeah, good job," Bo agrees, taking hold of Cletus' sweaty palm next.

"Thanks, guys!" Cletus says. "I hope you won't take it personal-like when I have to give you speeding tickets."

"Cletus," Luke scolds, as he steps back to lean on the wall, his arms coming to a fold across his chest. "Does it look like you're going to be giving us speeding tickets any time soon?" _What with how Bo is practically an invalid_ – Luke doesn't say it, but he might as well. It's what he means.

"Before you can give me a ticket, you've got to catch me," Bo jumps in. "And you ain't never going to do that."

Cletus may not be particularly smart and he may not possess a very good memory about how badly things went last time he played at being a deputy, but he's sunshine to Luke's storm clouds. Bo will cheerfully spar with him any day. (Or maybe just today, when he has had more than enough of Luke.)

"Oh, I don't know about that, Bo. I've been practicing. I even won the Choctaw Chase this July." Cletus is right proud of that, too.

"The Choctaw Chase?" is Luke, butting in and raining on Cletus' pathetic little parade. "I ain't ever even heard of that one. Have you, Bo?"

He has to admit he hasn't.

"Oh, sure you have," Cletus says, plopping himself into the plastic chair that sits near Bo's bed, crossing one leg over his other knee and putting his hands behind his head in a lazy position that indicates that he has nothing better to be doing right now than sitting right here, talking cars. "It's an annual thing, takes place during the Choctaw Fair each summer."

"Wait, you mean that thing on that tiny track?" Luke asks, incredulous. Bo has no idea what he's talking about until Luke adds, "Heck, Bo won that back in what, 1965?"

Bo laughs. "The one with the go carts?"

"Don't laugh, fellas," Cletus pleads. "Them little carts can go pretty fast."

"They sure can," Bo says with an affirming nod that's only slightly sarcastic. They've been known to crest seven miles per hour on a good day, when their tires are warm and the track is smooth. "But what I want to know is how did you fit into one?"

"It was kind of tight," the new deputy admits.

Bo giggles; Luke lets out a small snicker and pushes himself off the wall.

"It was real nice of you to come by, Cletus. Now, me and Bo got some exercises we got to do for his rehabilitation."

"No we ain't," Bo counters. Cletus looks back and forth between them, but doesn't make any kind of a move to get up. He doesn't take hints well, misses most social cues and is usually the last one to leave any party. "You just stay where you are, Cletus." The man in question offers up a lazy little shrug in response to that, and leans even further back in the chair.

"Bo," Luke says, in that deep, dark and meaningful way that's supposed to make everyone around him stop their foolishness and do what he says.

"Now Cletus," Bo says, ignoring Luke altogether. "What else have you been doing to practice up for being a deputy?" Luke levels a mean stare at him, but what's he going to do? It's Bo's leg that's broken, Cletus is Bo's guest, and this is Bo's room. Luke doesn't get a vote.

"Fine," his cousin mumbles. "We'll take a five minute break, then."

When Hazzard tale telling gets started, five minutes can become five hours before anyone knows what has happened. That's the goal now, and he's in fine shape to achieve it: Cletus is lazy, Luke is powerless and Bo is motivated.

* * *

"Dang it, Maudine!"

"Luke, you just watch your mouth." Yeah, yeah, he knows. Jesse doesn't take too kindly to anyone cursing his mule, even if there never was a more cursed creature ever born.

He throws up his hands in exaggerated frustration. After all, Bo's not here to act like the short-tempered brat, so it falls to Luke to fill in the gaps. "She won't come out of her stall."

"Well," Jesse says, pitch his voice rising in the middle. "I suppose you would like it if I rushed you out of bed in the morning."

No, in fact he wouldn't, but that's never stopped the old man before. Or didn't when he was younger, anyway. Eventually Luke learned the lesson that Bo never did: wake up before their uncle and don't give him a chance to come banging on the door.

"If she don't move, I can't exactly clean her stall now, can I?" he asks, planting his hands on his hips, Daisy-fashion. Great, in the span of about fifteen seconds he's behaved like both of his impetuous cousins. Next he'll be imitating Maudine herself.

"Come on, sweetheart," Jesse says, ignoring Luke's outbursts and cupping the mule's jaw in that same tender way he used to touch Aunt Lavinia.

It's no surprise that his uncle has taken Maudine's side of this little dispute – he always does. What is a surprise is the way the mule's ears go back in response and she lets loose with that awkward _wheeee-haw-a-haw_ that is her usual complaint to him and Bo, but which almost never gets unleashed on Jesse.

"See, now, you've got her upset," Jesse scolds. "Come on, sweetheart," he coos, "that's all right, I won't let him yell at you no more." Luke's getting ready to stomp away in disgust when he gets sent to the storage closet in the back of the barn for some alfalfa hay to lure her out. Several minutes and insults to Luke's pride later, Jesse's got his favorite child out in the paddock, so Luke can clean up after her. If the odds seem stacked against him, Luke has to admit, lately his days have been proceeding just about as badly as this one has so far.

"You've just got to learn to hold your temper," Jesse comes back into the barn to counsel him, like he's still an angry ten-year-old with no self-restraint. "Maudine, she can tell if you're upset or tense, and she ain't going to do what you want unless you can calm down and talk to her nice."

He notices, and not for the first time in his life, that no one ever tells Maudine that she has to talk to _him _nice. She can sass him all day and night, and Jesse will only announce that it serves him right, then treat Maudine to an apple.

But he holds his tongue because there are two ways this morning can go. He can behave himself and finish the chores, then he'll be free to go change into fresh clothes and head out to spend time with Bo. Or he can get into a sparring match with Jesse and spend the next hour getting a lecture, then another two performing some miserable, menial chore. It's an easy choice – he'd rather be with Bo. Anytime, anywhere, doing anything at all, with Bo is better than without.

And the more he can help his cousin rehabilitate, the sooner he'll be on his feet again and home.

So he nods and watches as the oldster head back to the house, then sets to work. It's really not long before he has cleaned up after Maudine and given her a fresh bed of straw (even if he might want to give her a swift kick) and is headed inside himself.

"Morning, sugar," Daisy greets when she hears him stomping the mud off his boots on the porch.

"Morning, Daisy," he calls back, wishes he had his watch with him. The smell of eggs and sausage wafts through the screen door between kitchen and porch, which means breakfast is nearly ready. He must be running late; he's usually heading out the door to get to the hospital before she's awake enough to cook. The screen door screams its usual complaint against abuse as he enters the kitchen. Daisy's tending to three different sizzling pans at once, just as smoothly as a drummer playing a set of snares. "I'm just going to get changed," he announces, passing by on his way to his bedroom. The clock on the high shelf in the living room tells him that he's not more than a few minutes off his usual schedule, so it's Daisy that's running early. He makes quick work of changing and running his fingers through his hair to get rid of any straw that might be caught there, and then he's heading back for the kitchen and coffee.

Jesse, complete with both mug and newspaper, is already seated when he gets there, and Daisy's putting some final flourishes on breakfast.

"Wash your hands," she advises him. "We're getting ready to eat." It's only then that he looks at the table to see three plates set out. Perfectly symmetrical in a way that it never is when everyone's home and two cousins squeeze together on one side of the table. Too much free space around the edges; it doesn't look right. Looks sad and lonely.

"I was just gonna have coffee," he offers, gets a flounce of Daisy's hair in answer to that one.

"You ain't," she starts, sparing the corner of her eyes to give him a hard look, then going back to her pans. "Going to tell me that you'd rather eat the food in some hospital cafeteria than to eat these nice victuals I just cooked up for you? And that you'd rather this food right here went to waste?"

No, he is apparently not going to tell her that. Or do anything else, other than walk over to the sink and start scrubbing his hands.

_Ten minutes_, he tells himself. Seven minutes to eat, one to thank her and another two to wash his dishes. Then he can be on the road. He turns off the water, goes to the stove to get his coffee, takes his place at the table. Stares at the wall across from him while his cousin takes her sweet time scraping the food into bowls and setting them on the table. _Eleven minutes, _he amends._ Maybe twelve_.

"Don't look so happy about it, sugar," she says with a huff as she puts the hashed brown potatoes on the table in front of him.

He unfolds his arms from across his chest, where he didn't even realize he had put them. "Thank you, Daisy." Must not seem convincingly sincere; she makes a face at him. "It smells real nice." That part gets Jesse to lower his paper enough to look from one of them to the other with suspicion. Apparently it's a notable event for him to compliment the aroma of his cousin's cooking.

Daisy sets the other two bowls on the table and all three of them take a minute to load up their plates. _No more than twelve minutes_, Luke thinks.

"Pass the potatoes," Jesse reminds him when the bowl doesn't move from in front of his plate. _Yes, sir_. He passes the bowl and picks up his fork.

"Luke," his uncle says, and he looks up to see a subtle head shake. _Grace first_. Heck, he hasn't forgotten that one since he was little enough to need a phonebook on his chair so he could reach the table. Daisy snickers, he gives her a dirty look that only half works when his face is flushed up to a real rosy shade of red, and then Jesse clears his throat and folds his hands. Luke and Daisy do the same.

Grace seems to go on far too long, though it's pretty much the same exact thing Jesse says three times a day.

He and Daisy echo their amens and for a few blissful moments afterward there's nothing but chewing and swallowing. And, he has to admit, what he's eating now is far tastier (and far less likely to repeat on him later) than what he could get in the hospital. Maybe he could be a little more grateful to Daisy—

"Luke, honey." And then again, maybe he ought to be a little aware of the dangers behind cousins bearing gifts. "I need a favor." Of course she does. "I need you to follow me over to Cooter's and then take me on to work."

"_Now?_" Unless Boss has her inventorying the silverware (again, because those forks just seem to walk right out of the Boar's Nest and they don't grow on trees after all), there's no reason she needs to be there at the crack of dawn. And going downtown, then to the roadhouse will take him a good half hour out of his way.

"No, not _now_," she answers back, hotly. "This afternoon."

That's even less convenient, really. He and Jesse have a pretty tight routine when it comes to the pickup truck and trips to Tri-County. The minute the oldster gets back, Luke commandeers the truck and heads back over to the hospital for Bo's second round of rehab.

"Daisy," he complains. "What do you got to take your jeep to Cooter's for, anyways? Whatever's wrong with it, I'll fix it." In those few hours when he's stuck here anyway, he might as well do something useful.

"Luke," Jesse says, a quiet warning.

"I been asking you to fix it all week. You ain't said nothing except 'Later, Daisy,' and then you jump into the pickup and run off to the hospital."

"Daisy," Jesse tries.

"Not _the hospital_, Bo! Bo's in that hospital, and he's going to be there for at least another month. You really think your car is more important than—"

"No, I don't think that, but Bo was in that hospital for a whole week before you—"

"Luke! Daisy!" There's that voice that Luke hasn't heard in the three weeks since he and Bo tried to punch each other's lights out over Diane's intentions. _Get on your feet, stop acting like jackasses and apologize to one another_. "Now there ain't going to be no yelling at my breakfast table." Other than the yelling Jesse's doing right now, apparently. But the better part of wisdom keeps Luke from saying that out loud.

This disagreement doesn't matter, Maudine doesn't matter, what Daisy was about to say to him about not being there for Bo in that first week he was in the hospital doesn't matter. All that matters is getting Bo back on his feet again. That's what he tells himself, anyway.

"Luke, you're going to get up right now, take them keys off the rack, and head out to the hospital. Daisy, you're going to finish your breakfast and then do the dishes." Well – this is the first thing to go his way the whole morning. He's on his feet and halfway to the rack when Jesse grabs his wrist to stop him. He manages not to shake off his uncle's grip, no matter how badly he wants to. "And then, this afternoon, before you go back to see Bo, you'll do exactly as she asked you to do. And you'll do it with a smile."

"Yes, sir." He'll take her to Cooter's and then to work with a smile. But he might just crack all his teeth with how tightly they'll be gritted.

* * *

Bo looks up at the ceiling (the contours of which he knows far too well by now) and says a quiet prayer of thanks for Cooter. Or for Saturday. Or for Cooter and Saturday and traditions that even Luke doesn't seem interested in breaking. And for the skeleton crew of orderlies and LPNs on this floor during weekends.

And for beer. And doughnuts, and Cooter's infectious laugh that gets Luke joining in. For the cool condensation of the can that feels so good against his hand and, when he holds it up there, his face. For a day that feels closer to normal than any in what seems like years, and even for Rosco P. Coltrane, who is the subject of a long-winded yarn that Cooter's unwinding. For the distraction that makes him forget, if only for a few moments at time, that every part of him that's covered in plaster itches miserably.

For Luke, leaning back in the brightly colored, cheap plastic chair that he dragged out of the corner to sit by the bed, one hand stuffing a doughnut in his mouth while the other holds his beer low and close to the floor. For the welcome break from his cousin's intense regimen of physical therapy. For the paper bag in front of Cooter's feet, that contains even more beer, and what the heck, for Cooter's feet themselves. They may not smell the best (and he's spent enough time in the man's home, where shoes of any kind are strictly optional, to know) but they walked that beer and those doughnuts in here. For the box of doughnuts on Cooter's lap, for the way he slouches in the more comfortable, stuffed chair that's practically a permanent fixture in this room, so those doughnuts won't go sliding to the floor.

"And then old Rosco says, he says, 'but Boss, there's air in spare tires, right?' and Boss says something like, 'of course there is, you numbskull.'" This last part is growled out in a rough imitation of Boss's annoyed tone. The impersonation is terrible, but that doesn't matter one bit. "So Rosco says, 'well then, what if we put four spare tires in Cletus's car. That way it'll float next time he lands in the pond.' Well, Boss set him straight about how he's landed in more ponds than Cletus could ever hope to, and if all the air in between his ears hasn't kept him afloat, then four spare tires ain't going to make one bit of difference."

Luke's head's tipped back in a full-out belly laugh while Cooter giggles and swills the beer around in his can. Must mean it's almost empty and the man's getting ready to get himself another. This is the only flaw in the beer-and-doughnut breakfast tradition – Cooter drinks at twice the speed any sane human would, which means he gets the lion's share of the beer. Then again, their friend with the reasonably steady income does the buying, so it's not like the Duke boys have any kind of a right to complain.

"All right," oh, but here comes a person person who does. "Bo Duke, you just give me that can. And you other boys, too. You know better than to bring that sort of contraband into a hospital."

"Shirley?" Bo asks at voice-cracking pitch, as the nurse crosses into the room with her hand out. She seems mighty serious, and Bo's beer is in immediate jeopardy. "What are you doing here? Ain't you supposed to be somewheres else?" Anywhere, really, would be better than where she is right now. "Ain't it your day off?"

She's marched herself right up to his bedside now, hand out like a elementary school teacher demanding that he produce the frog that got sneaked into her class in his pocket. "Overtime. We had a couple of call outs and we have a minimum coverage rule that if we lose too many, others have to be called in. So we got enough bodies here to keep an eye on troublemakers like you. Come on, hand it over."

Bo considers taking one more swig before he does as he's told, but then thinks better of it. Unless he wants his weekday sponge baths to be performed with ice water and steel wool, he'd best do what she wants. He sighs and gives her the can.

"Yours too," she says to Cooter. The mechanic's in no position to protest, having just jammed half a doughnut into his mouth so she won't confiscate that. Bo would lay good money that he sucked down his last swig of beer, too, but he hands over the can anyway. "And that," she says, taking Luke's doughnut from him. He doesn't even try to fight her.

The bag in the middle of the floor gets scooped up and cans of varying emptiness get put in there along with however many full ones are left. Shirley rolls up the top of the bag and grips it in her right hand, then goes after the box of doughnuts with her left.

"Aww," Cooter complains, his eyes sad and pleading, but he doesn't make any kind of a move to stop her. He never has been one to sass older women, not since third grade and domineering old Mrs. Hauser who used to make him spend hours at the blackboard instead of at recess, writing pointless sentences like 'I will not disrupt class' a hundred times, then making him rewrite them if his penmanship was too untidy. Now he just kind of drops his head in defeat.

"You can get these back at the nurse's station in the main corridor. When you leave and not before." _Young man_, not said, but implied in her tone all the same.

She's almost out the door when Bo calls after her, "You ain't just taking them things so you can have yourself a real nice breakfast with the other nurses, are you Shirley?"

Cooter cringes and Luke looks at him like he's lost his mind. But Shirley just points a finger at him around the grip she has on the bag of beer cans. "You be careful, youngster," she says with a crooked smile. "Or I might just happen to forget to bring you a bedpan Monday morning."

He smiles back at her. They're still friends, but she's got rules to enforce. He's not going to hold that against her, any more than she's going to hold it against him that he's bound to break a few more before he leaves here.

"See you Monday," he chirps. The gesture she makes with her hand might be a wave or might just be dismissal. Either way, she marches out with all their goodies.

When her shoes have squeaked well down the hall, Luke reaches behind the bedside table that now holds a half a hundred get well cards and a few dying plants, and pulls out the half-empty can of beer he must have shoved back there when Shirley marched in. He hands it over to Bo to finish.

"Thanks, Luke," he says with a happy grin. There's nothing the Duke boys can't accomplish when they work together.

"You're welcome. Just drink it quick before 'mom' comes back and kicks me out permanently for letting you have it after she's already taken yours away."


	10. Over and Out

**10. Over and Out**

He stops short – just barely short – of calling Bo a lowly maggot. Not that he really thinks Bo is a maggot or even wants to call him one. It's just that he's running out of clearer thoughts and better ideas.

"Keep that knee straight. Give me more from the hip."

Bo stops giving him anything at all except a dirty look. "It hurts, Luke."

He's tried the tricks he remembers coaches doing back in his little league days. The sort of firm encouragement and gentle instruction. But Bo is more stubborn than any of the young baseball players Luke can remember, and besides, his cousin played little league games for those same coaches. He knows how to avoid falling for anything before Luke can even get around to trying it.

_Keep it moving, keep it moving_, he thinks. _It'll seem to go faster that way._

Luke shrugs. "It's supposed to hurt. That's how you know it's working."

But Bo's opposed to keeping anything at all moving.

"No, it ain't supposed to hurt, Luke. Not like this," Bo snaps. His face is flushed, but it's sure not from exertion. The boy's been downright lazy all morning, barely wanting to complete even the easiest of exercises. "It's my body, I ought to know."

High school basketball coaches were a little rougher, more likely to holler, but what they yelled was almost always a positive message.

"Come on, Bo, you can do this in your sleep." It's just an outer thigh exercise, one that involves Bo trying to push his good leg out to the side while Luke tries to hold it in place. And it's not like Luke's using all his strength or even half. It ought to be easy.

"Well, then, I'll do it tonight in my sleep and you ain't got to worry about it none."

Football coaches would threaten to put lazy players on the bench. Thing is, it won't do Luke any good to tell Bo he's going to sideline him when Bo is perfectly willing to sit out every play.

"Come on, don't you want to get better?" Every coach he ever had, including when Jesse would take him out into the farmyard and toss him grounders, asked him that question in one way or another.

"No matter how many times I lift this leg," Bo says, pointing to his right, "it's not going to make this one get better any faster," pointing to his left.

Of course, his childhood self never had nearly as good a response as that to offer up.

"Not right now, maybe, but when you get on your feet again—"

"When I get on my feet again, I'll be on my feet. Right now I'm on my back and it don't matter none how many times I move my leg or don't."

Drill instructors, they didn't waste their breath with negotiation or encouragement. They just screamed out insults and made everyone in the platoon double up on any exercise that any of the guys wouldn't or couldn't complete.

"How about we do some arm work, then?" Bo's usually up for a good arm wrestling match, even when he doesn't want to do anything else. "Bet I can pin you in under a minute."

"Of course you can, Luke. You're upright and I'm on my back. Only way I can ever win is if you let me," he pouts. "I don't need you to patronize me and I don't need you to exercise my arms for me. I got weights for that." So he does, provided by Doc Petticord himself. Of course, both of them are currently lined up on the cushion of the bigger chair in the room, outside of Bo's reach. Luke would swear that the only time they ever move from there is when Bo gets a visitor that sits in that seat. Then they get set on the floor until some unsuspecting nurse nearly trips over them and lifts them back up into the chair again. At least the hospital staff is getting an upper body workout. They're going to need it, since apparently Bo's going to have to be carried around for the rest of his life.

This is the point at which Luke finds himself wanting to call Bo a lazy maggot, a coddled sweet pea, and half a dozen other nasty names that Marine recruits got called back when he was in basic training.

And then he catches himself. This isn't the military, isn't a football game or even a kids' game of baseball. It's Bo stuck in a bed for more than three weeks now. Which is like trying to chain a coyote to a tree and expecting it to turn into a pleasant house pet. It's no wonder his cousin is testy and resentful.

"How about if I just massage your muscles?"

Bo shrugs, Luke takes that as consent and sets to work on his cousin's right calf.

* * *

"Is this helping, sugar?"

No, it's not. It's just a light skritch, skritch, skitch when what he wants is a deep a satisfying scratch. Something that will hurt enough to make him forget every itch he ever had. Drawing blood would be a relief.

But this is Daisy, and she'd never dig her nails in that deep. Not unless he dinged her jeep, anyway. Then she wouldn't stop as his skin, she'd scratch him right down to the bone.

"Can't you do that a little harder?"

Instead of doing as he asks, she bends over and kisses his forehead. He gets a faceful of her fluffy hair, which doesn't make him any less itchy. "It ain't going to help nothing if I do, sugar," she says as he spits errant stands out of his mouth. "Me scratching your shoulder," where there's no plaster covering him in the first place, but she can't scratch him where there_ is_ plaster covering him. "Ain't going to do nothing good for you. Casts itch. There ain't nothing you can really do about it."

Daisy would know, or thinks she would. Back when she was a skinny brat who followed him and Luke wherever they went, she insisted on riding her bike to the pond to fish with them. Hers was a bright pink girl's bike with a low bar, a banana seat and little pompom things on the handlebars. Not her fault, really, all the Duke kids' bikes were passed down from surrounding farmers' kids, and then passed down again when the Dukes got too big for them. There are probably some nine-year-olds riding those same bikes along that same dirt trail to the Chattahoochee River today. Hopefully, whoever is riding sturdier bikes, the ones that he and Luke were riding that day, is being nicer than the two of them were to whoever's stuck on that pink bike. Small wheels and a thin frame, it couldn't stand up to much. Not that the young Dukes cared about that – he and Luke were riding as fast as they could to leave Daisy behind and she was peddling hard to keep up. When her front tire hit a boulder in the path, there was no way the bike could get over it, so it threw her over the handlebars instead. Her arms went up in automatic defense of her face, and when she landed hard on the right one, it broke. She screamed the whole way home with Luke carrying her and Bo trotting ahead to get Jesse. For the next six weeks she wore cast from her wrist to her elbow that got signed by every boy from the third to the sixth grades, and Enos Strate signed it twice. And she's resented everything pink and girly ever since.

"You ain't got no idea," Bo informs her. "You ain't never had near as much cast covering you as I got now."

"I know," she agrees, settling back into the cushioned chair that she's pulled up to the left side of his bed and running her fingers through his hair.

"You was back to your normal self the next day," or maybe the one after. She might just have let herself be babied a little bit at first. Luke was feeling guilty as heck and had made Bo promise that they wouldn't do anything so fool stupid as trying to leave her behind again. And their cousin had been unusually patient with anything Daisy asked him to do, at least at first. Seems to Bo's memory like the line got drawn when she asked him to wash her doll's dress. _Stupid dolls don't need stupid dresses_, are what he remembers as Luke's exact words. "You could run around and do chores and go to school so you'd have half a chance to forget you itched. Me, I'm stuck in this bed all day and night with nothing else to do."

"I'm so sorry, sugar." She sounds almost as miserable as he feels.

"All I want is to get up and do normal things. Have a meal at a table," use the bathroom by himself, "go for a drive, or just take a shower."

There's a quiet click as her tongue comes away from her teeth. The backs of her fingers graze his cheek.

It's been a while since he got to spend time alone with Daisy, without Jesse or Luke or Cletus or Cooter hanging around the edges of his conversations with her. He has looked forward to this, to quiet time with his female cousin, who can be counted on to be sympathetic and gentle, as a contrast to Luke's relentlessness. He thought it would help, maybe, to hear kind words of compassion, to be touched nicely and cooed at.

Shirley's motherly, but she's also efficient and distracted. She only has but so much attention to give before she moves on to the next person. Jesse's paternal, but he frowns when Bo gets to complaining about how long he's been stuck on his back in a hospital bed. Luke's just Luke, telling him what to do without the slightest concern for how he feels about anything at all.

Maybe he thought that with Daisy, he could just say what's bothering him, she'd understand and he would feel better.

"Would you like me to wash your hair for you, sugar?" she offers. It's kind of her, downright sweet. And just like every other word that she's said to him today, it doesn't help one bit.

* * *

"Bo, it ain't doing you no good to pout."

"I ain't pouting, Luke." Oh, yes he is. The only thing missing is a protruding lower lip. "I just don't feel like doing any exercises today, is all. My hip is sore."

"That's because you ain't moving it around enough."

"I ain't supposed to move it, that's why it's in a cast. That's why it's wired to the frame." Bo's hands are gesturing in exaggerated frustration. It's a good thing the IV got removed a couple days back, or he'd be ripping it out now. It's also a good sign that the risk of infection has dropped enough that the IV is no longer needed, but somehow Bo's not seeing it that way. Or managing to be positive about anything at all.

"I mean you ain't moving enough to get good blood flow. Doc Petticord said you'd hurt more if you didn't move some, and it would take longer to heal."

"He also said not to overdo it or I could hurt more." Yeah, he did and Luke wasn't too big of a fan of him saying it, either. It's true enough, but Bo's always been a little bit lazy and giving him any excuse to quit is not a good idea. "It's my body, I know when I'm overdoing it."

"Come on, cousin." Though he is standing on the tile floor of Bo's hospital room, looking at the ugly mustard-yellow decor that climbs halfway up the walls, while Bo lies in exactly the same sprawled position he's been in for twenty-two days, Luke would swear that this feels an awful lot like the farmyard after that nasty fistfight over the carnival, when Bo was shutting down on him. Closing him out of everything he planned to do and running off to Diane because she was easier on him. She never asked him to think or to work hard or to do anything he didn't want to do. The girl was the reason to opt out then, and _my hip hurts_ is the excuse now. Except, look where choosing the easy road back then got Bo, and how is taking the easy road now going to help anything?

"You know I'm in a hospital, right?" Yes, he knows that. "With doctors and nurses and oh, yeah, there's some folks here that are trained in physical therapy, too." Yes, there are. Early on, there was talk of setting Bo up to spend a couple of hours a week with one or another of them, but it never happened because there was never a need. Luke was here and he knew Bo better than any therapist ever would. Knew his moods and his quirks, all his tricks for getting out of hard work. "I reckon they'd know better than you do about why my hip hurts and when I should quit."

His cousin turns his head resolutely away from him, like he can ignore him in this small of a space.

Luke reaches for the plastic pitcher that's practically buried in the pile of get well cards that have amassed on the bedside table. The most recent one came all the way from Los Angeles with Enos' carefully printed handwriting on the envelope. Seems like the former Hazzard deputy is mighty busy out there on the west coast, but he did find time to send a greeting back to his injured friend.

"Here," he says, offering Bo the plastic yellow cup that he's filled with tepid water. "Have a drink, let's take a break."

Old cranky huffs a sigh and turns back to him. "Thanks," he says, taking the cup from him and closing his mouth around the bent straw. And this is one of the ways in which Bo has improved since Luke started working with him. Back then he would as soon let someone hold the cup for him as take it himself. Now there's no question about it – Bo feeds himself, drinks by himself, and has even started giving himself his daily sponge bath. At least the parts he can reach. He's made so much progress, and yet he's fighting against any effort to help him make more.

"Listen," Luke reasons, as he finds a seat on the edge of that beside chair. Figures he's being perfectly calm and logical, and Bo will recognize that and listen to him. "Doc says you might be on crutches in as soon as three weeks. Seems to me like you're going to need to strengthen that left arm some, and of course, your right leg—"

"What if I ain't on crutches in three weeks, Luke," Bo answers back, waving the cup in the air so it'll get taken away from him and he can go back to his dramatic gestures. Luke reaches out and takes it from his hand, places it very deliberately on the table. Bo's getting worked up again, which means he has to stay calm. "What if I ain't ever on my feet again?"

"What?" So much for the even tempered approach. It's one thing for Bo to be unreasonable, and another for him to make utterly preposterous (and self-defeating) suggestions. "Why would that happen?"

"I don't know, Luke, maybe because half of all people who break their hips never walk again!"

"I don't know where that number comes from." In fact, he's never heard it until just now. For all he knows, it's been made up by one particularly irritable man's mind. "But you got to realize that most people that break their hips are Jesse's age or older. You're young and strong. You'll be on your feet in no time if you just keep—"

"And what if I'm not?" Bo repeats, like a brat that's so sure he's got a great point.

"What kind of attitude is that?"

"It's mine, all right?"

Luke gets back to his feet, paces across the room and runs his hands through his hair. Bo's being impossible on purpose, just to get a rise out of him, to get him to argue and forget all about getting any work done today.

"Listen, cousin, I only got so much time before I have to head back to the farm and get some repairs done on that barn roof. Let's just—"

"Why don't you just go now then? You got a roof to fix, I got a sore hip and there are physical therapists here that can work with me anyways. You just go on back to the farm and don't worry about coming back here."

_(I guess this farm's just gotten a bit too small for both me and Luke.)_

"Bo."

"No, I mean it, you should go."

_(There's some things a man's gotta learn for himself. I guess this is one of the more important ones.)_

"Just get out Luke, just go home and don't worry about me. I'll be fine."

_(Uncle Jesse, I reckon it's Luke that's got to do some of the realizing.)_

"Is everything all right in here?"

Seems like he and Bo must have gotten loud enough to be heard in the halls. The nurse that's in the doorway checking on them isn't Shirley, the large-boned, maternal woman that would probably give Bo a sarcastic word or two and tell him to just get to work on his rehab already. This one's young, quiet, a little bit nervous. Dark-haired and small, and she fills out her uniform in all the best ways.

"We're fine," Luke announces.

"I was just asking my cousin to leave," Bo informs her. "But he won't go."

"He's just having a bad day," Luke tries to explain, but Bo's shouting over him.

"I want him to leave – this is my room and I don't want him in it."

"Maybe," the nurse says, looking from him to Bo and back. Biting her lip, and if she could get away with it, she'd probably be nibbling her nails now. "You should go."

"He don't mean that, he's—"

"Goodbye, Luke," Bo calls from his bed.

"Sounds like he means it to me," the nurse says, standing up a little taller, her voice a little louder. "I think it's for the best if you went now."

Hell, she might as well be Diane all over again. Giving Bo permission to act like any kind of brat he wants to, regardless of the consequences.

He looks at her, and her upright little stance, then back at Bo and his smug face.

_(I ain't got no regrets about nothing. Especially not this.)_

Luke turns on his heel to walk up to the bedside table and grab the pickup's key from where he left it, then marches toward the door.

"Fine," he says, and then he's gone.


	11. If I Had a Hammer

**11. If I Had a Hammer**

"Well," Uncle Jesse says as he wanders into Bo's room. No knock, no throat clearing – everyone just walks in here without thought to whether or not their company will be welcomed. Maybe because it's a hospital and it only makes sense that everyone stuck in here would want to be visited, or maybe because Bo's usually the first to want someone by his side, but by now it's getting dang old._ Go see Bo. Just walk in and behave any way you want. He's in no position to do anything about it._ "You look about as happy as Luke does."

"Please," he says, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. "I don't want to talk about Luke." His jerk of a cousin who never knows when to let up, when to just quit and let someone else make a decision once in a while. Who embarrassed him yesterday in front of that cute little part time nurse, Debbie, the same way he did in front of Diane. Talking about Bo like he wasn't even there, like he was a little kid who couldn't make up his own mind for himself. Diane was smart enough to call Luke on it, and Debbie backed Bo eventually, but it's doubtful his cousin has learned a damn thing.

"All right," Jesse says, pushing the cushioned chair back from his bedside with an awful scrape of its feet, then lifting the weights off to deposit them on the mattress next to Bo. They may put an indentation in the bed that's a little uncomfortable, but at least Bo can get to them himself that way, without having to ask for help. Jesse's the only one who has taken the time to figure that out. "What do you want to talk about?" his uncle asks as he lowers himself slowly – and with a heavy grunt – into the chair. Patronizing him, pretending it's okay to not talk about Luke when Jesse has never, not once, tolerated his boys being at odds.

"Luke's a jackass," he offers up for consideration, staring hard at the pulleys and cables over his head rather than meeting his uncle's eye.

"Well, sure, he can be," Jesse agrees. "He can be stubborn and thoughtless." Huh, this is going better than Bo could have hoped. He turns his head to look at his uncle, a little smirk pulling at the corner of his lips. "But he comes by it honestly. He's a Duke and I reckon we're all like that at one time or another." If that's a fact, then Luke must be the Dukiest Duke of them all. "But I know that he loves you. And whatever he done to make you this upset, he only done because he means well."

Bo sighs, and goes back to staring at the contraption over his head. "He just means to get his way."

"Well, now, I ain't sure about that. I think he _thinks_ he knows what's best for you. And maybe he's wrong sometimes and maybe you're the only one who can tell him that."

"I did tell him that, Jesse, and he didn't listen to me. He just kept pushing and pushing and then – oh, never mind." There's no point, really. In the end, Jesse's going to take Luke's side_. He's older than you. You got to listen to him even when you don't want to. He's got more experience_… all the refrains of his childhood running through his head in a cacophonous rush. They loom at the end of this conversation, so why wait to get there? He can just quit talking right now.

"And then what, Bo?" Jesse prods, gently. "What did he do that made you so mad?"

Oh, heck, he never has been any good at shutting his mouth and keeping it that way. That's always been Luke's thing, anyway, and he doesn't particularly want to be anything like Luke right now.

"He just don't respect me. He don't listen when I tell him things. And then he goes and does my talking for me, like it's up to him to tell other people what I really meant." Damn it, this would be a real good time to have usable legs. To have a means to walk away – not far, but maybe to the corner or something – until he can compose himself. Damn tears when he's mad, not sad. But nobody can ever tell the difference. "He embarrassed me in front of Debbie."

"Who's Debbie?"

_What do you want to talk about_, Jesse asked him a minute ago. If he could go back he'd answer, _nothing_. _Nothing at all._ He's about sick to death of talking, of being talked to. Of looking at the ceiling or the cables and pulleys and wishing for company, then getting mad when people come because the only thing he can do at all is talk. Duke men weren't made for conversations. They were made for action.

Bo waves his hand in the air, trying to dismiss this line of conversation. "Just a nurse."

"Well, if she's just a nurse, how come Luke embarrassing you in front of her was bad enough to make you this upset?" And there's no point in pretending he's not, when there are tears at the corners of his eyes, dripping hotly into his hair. "I mean, if she's a nurse here, she's had to help you with a bedpan, and I can't imagine what Luke could have said that's more embarrassing than that."

"It's not exactly what he says, it's just that he's always doing it. He did the same thing to me in front of Diane."

"Diane," Jesse says with a sage nod. "You ain't never heard from Diane, did you." No, he hasn't and Jesse knows that without him even having to commit to so much as a nod on the subject. "You still upset about her?"

Well, for those few glorious days when he was with her, he had beautiful, sunshine pictures in his head of a life together. Exciting, adventurous and the whole notion suited him perfectly, because it took the best parts of what had been his life already, added some fireworks, and cut out all the drudgery around the edges. And now he's got no part of his old life left, nothing but drudgery, and no girl, either. So, yeah, he's not thrilled about that.

"Not really. I guess she was like cotton candy. Pretty and sweet and then when you try to bite into it, there ain't nothing there but air." Gone before you know it, and the only thing left over is a bellyache. "But it sure does look good at first."

"Well," Jesse says, pulling out the red bandana he uses as a handkerchief and laying it on the bed next to the weights. Just in case Bo wants it or something. "I wouldn't blame you if you was still upset about her and the way she just disappeared without even checking on you. She ain't been here once when you needed her."

_But_, the unspoken lesson, _Luke has_.

"Wasn't she nor Luke here when I first got hurt." Thing is, he really would like to use Jesse's handkerchief. Just in private, without his uncle looking on. And though he's not used to a whole lot of privacy when everything he owns, from their car to their bedroom, is half Luke's, usually he can manage to find a quiet place when he needs one.

"I know," Jesse agrees. "And I reckon you got a point there, though Luke was there with you right after the crash and he refused to leave you until you was downstairs in the emergency room. He rode with you in the ambulance." The skepticism Bo feels must show on his face, because Jesse adds, "Yes, he did. He saw you right before you went into surgery, too."

Bo finally gives up and uses his good hand to grab the handkerchief. Wipes his eyes and blows his nose, and gets a little pat from a meaty hand on his upper left arm as a reward for being a good boy. Or just maybe in sympathy.

"And then he went missing for a week, I know," Jesse consoles. "You kept asking for him and couldn't none of us tell you where he was. And we wasn't looking for him, neither, because we was too busy worrying about you. We knew he was all right, though, because the chores kept getting done when none of us was looking." Of course they did. Even when he's a jerk, Luke's responsible to a fault. "Luke ain't got a whole lot of tools at his disposal when it comes to looking out for you, you know. Ever since he was a little boy, he's been trying. But he's kind of like a hammer," instead of his usual buzz saw, "and when you're a hammer, you treat every problem like it's a nail. Whacking at it and banging on it until it either goes away or gets so beat up and bent out of shape that it's hardly recognizable."

That's how Bo feels, bent out of shape. Even if he knows that Jesse's not talking about him right now.

"Anyway, you know where he was, now. I reckon if you asked him, he'd swear up and down that it was his beholden duty to make sure that the man who hurt you got locked up. And you can probably understand that. If the roles was reversed, you might figure you'd want to do the same."

"I reckon," he admits, putting the handkerchief back where he got it from, though he doesn't figure that Jesse really wants it back now.

"But you wouldn't have," Jesse says with utter certainty. "Most likely you would have stayed with Luke until he was at least past the worst of being hurt before you went out and hunted Carl down. Of course, Carl and the carnival might have been out of reach by then. But Luke never would have been left wondering where you was."

The warmth of that hand that hand been on his arm disappears. When he turns to look, he sees Jesse stroking his heard and staring off at nothing.

"I ain't saying you'd be better than him or he'd be better than you. He's brave enough to run off on his own after someone that could kill him. But you'd be brave enough to face him when he was hurt bad, to stay and watch him suffer and try to give him solace. He ain't too good at watching you in pain." Jesse's eyes meet his now. "And that's why he wants you to get better. He don't want you to hurt no more, and maybe he's been beating you up like you wasn't nothing more than a nail, but his intentions are good. He wants you to have a full life again."

And that, finally is too much. Bo's mouth opens, closes again because he can't trust himself to talk. His eyes burn like there's fire behind them and his throat is so tight that he lets out an unplanned squeak. He swallows, or tries, but it only makes his throat hurt more. There's nothing to do but let the words out and hope that once they're on the other side, his throat will loosen up.

"What if I ain't never better, Jesse? What if I can't get back on my feet? Will Luke even—" there's more to the sentence, but its stuck tight in the knot of his throat. Bo grabs the handkerchief and turns his head away again. Wipes his eyes and his nose but it doesn't help anything at all.

Jesse's hand is back on his arm, rubbing and patting. Not soft and sweet like Daisy's, more like he's commanding Bo, with just that little movement, to pull himself together.

"Any good farmer knows that there ain't no good that comes from playing the what-if game," Jesse counsels when he figures Bo's listening well enough. "Locusts, drought, flood, fire – all them things can happen, and every few years one of them is bound to happen. But if you worried about it too much, why, you'd never plant in spring. You'd be too busy expecting something bad to happen before fall. And if you never planted, well, you'd never have a chance at a truly bountiful harvest. And every few years, one of them is bound to happen, too."

Bo bites his lip, takes a deep, sawing breath. Wipes his eyes and nose again. Tries not to sniffle, fails, figures he sounds like a miserable kid. But he turns his head to look at his uncle again.

"The only way that I know for sure that you won't get on your feet again, is if you stop trying. Luke may just be a jackass, but he loves you and he's in this thing with you all the way to the end. Now," Jesse says, and it's dangerously close to scolding. "Are _you_ in this thing all the way to the end?"

* * *

"Bonnie Mae ain't Bo."

Well, he knows that. First of all, Bonnie Mae's got four legs, all of which are strong enough to stand on. Second of all, she's not exactly blond and third of all, she's far too rational to be Bo. She needs milking, so she lets herself be milked.

Even if she does try to eat his hair while he's doing it. He shoves her face away from him again and goes back to what he was doing.

"Don't you mind him, Bonnie Mae," Daisy says pointedly. "He's just out of sorts."

"I ain't out of sorts," he informs them both. Bonnie Mae pulls her ear back and gives him a suspicious, one-eyed look. Daisy just stands right where she is, in the middle of the farmyard, between the post Rodney the rooster favors and the one that Bonnie Mae is hitched to, in heels tall and spiky enough it's a wonder they're staying on the ground instead of digging their way in.

"Of course he's not," Daisy tells the goat. At least she's being useful, keeping Bonnie Mae distracted from mauling him. "He's just everyday, cheerful Luke Duke." Then again, she's not so helpful that he's ready to put up with her endless talking.

"Ain't you got nothing better to do?" he asks, his eyes raising up over Bonnie Mae's wiry back hair, giving his cousin what he hopes is a withering look. Not that it has ever done him any good before, but maybe this time she'll figure out that she's not wanted here.

"Ain't you?" she asks back. "Why don't you just go see him?"

Bo, and he hasn't told her anything important about him. Just that Bo told him to get lost, so he did.

"Because he don't want me to." It's quite simple, really. Someone tells you to leave enough times, then elicits help in getting rid of you, you go. And you don't return.

"Luke," she says like she's the smart one and he's just a fool. Fine, he's a fool, but he's a fool with work to do. And if he stops paying attention to her, eventually she'll go away. Or head off to work or something. In the meantime, she's come close enough to pat Bonnie Mae's head, and that's okay. "He wants you to. He's just – he ain't himself."

(_If there's one thing I taught you boys, I thought it was that there was two sides to every argument._)

Oh, he's perfectly himself. The same spoiled brat he ever was, stubborn and lazy and more interested in pretty girls than making sense. He doesn't want to do the work it takes to get back up on his feet, but that's okay. One of those young nurses from the hospital will probably be perfectly willing to wheel him around in a shiny wheelchair for the rest of his life.

(_All right, well this time Bo's on the wrong side._)

"Luke, you can't go taking everything he says right now seriously."

"He sounded pretty serious to me."

(_Oh he is, is he?_

_Yeah._

_Well, his excuse is that he's in love. What's yours?_)

"He's just scared."

Well, if he's so scared, he should be happy to have a companion. Happy to have someone who wants to help him, who will stick by him. Happy, finally, after everything that's happened, to have family. But once again, he got some girl to get between him and Luke.

"He ain't scared. He's just," he takes his hand off Bonnie Mae's teat to wave it in the air and show his frustration, and ends up smacking the goat in the head. She bleats her complaint at the mistreatment. "Bo." He pats Bonnie Mae in apology.

Daisy's hands snap to her hips.

(_Well, I don't take kindly to getting punched in the face for speaking my mind._)

"Luke Duke, you're about as sensitive as sandpaper. Now, Bo ain't been easy for none of us to get along with for more than a few days at a time. You ain't the only one he's yelled at or gotten upset with. He's been stuck in a bed for weeks with only a crazy contraption, a steel rod and a prayer to give him hope that his leg will heal up straight. You figure you wouldn't say a couple of stupid things if you was in the same position?"

(_Oh, so your pride's been hurt, huh? And you gotta strike out and hit something. All right, hit me._)

Bonnie Mae's ear swivels back again. She stands ready for Luke to either finish milking her and take the argument elsewhere, or to make Daisy quit yelling at him. He applies himself more seriously to the task of pulling at her teats, because there's nothing that's going to stop Daisy now that she's gotten up a full head of steam.

"Quit that, Luke!" He gets smacked on the head.

"Ow, Daisy—"

"That's what Bonnie Mae says. Stop being so rough with her just because you're mad at Bo." He could explain that he's not mad at Bo, but it wouldn't help anything. She'd only waste more time telling him that he most certainly is mad, and then launch right back into the rest of her lecture. "Get up, I'll finish for you."

(_Just go on, hit me right there._

_Uncle Jesse, you know I can't do that—_

_Go ahead._

—_you know that. I can't do that._

_Why not?_)

He gets up off the stump and makes an exaggerated gesture at it. _Go ahead, be my guest_.

It's amazing how Daisy can make plopping down on an unstable old stump, with her knees spread wide, look dainty.

(_Why, I'd rather see you hit me than go through the pain of watching you two hit each other_.)

"Don't you go nowhere Luke," she says, though she hasn't looked up from the rhythm of pull and tug that she sets up under the goat. And he's quiet on his feet, a trained hunter and a veteran Marine. How she knows he's sneaking off must come down to some kind of intuition. "I ain't done with you." Of course she's not. And it doesn't matter whether or not he's done with her.

"I got to chop some wood," he tries.

"Not until I'm done with Bonnie Mae," and with my nonsense lecture, "you ain't."

He lets out a breath, tells himself it's not a sigh. Tells himself that putting his hands on his hips and kicking a dirt clod isn't the act of a petulant little boy.

"Now, I figure you ought to know," she says more quietly. Almost sing-song and he can't be sure whether it's him or Bonnie Mae that she's trying to soothe. "That every day for that first week, Bo was asking for you. At first he was asking for Diane, too." Well, that's just fabulous news, really. "But when he figured out that she wasn't coming, and that the carnival had just up and moved without her even stopping in to see him, all he wanted was you. There wasn't nothing me or Jesse could say to make him any less miserable."

(_Now listen to me, Luke. Us Dukes ain't got much when it comes to worldly goods. But we got something that's more important._)

"Bo wants you there," she asserts with full confidence that her words are gospel. "But you got to remember, he's been stuck in that room, in that bed, in that same position," now look who's abusing Bonnie Mae's teats. Dukes probably ought to learn not to use their hands so much when they're talking. "For weeks now. He's subject to whatever anyone wants to do to him, even if it's just visiting. It's not like he can close his door or keep people out. He wants you, but you got to listen to him when he says he needs a break from you. You'd give him space if he was here on the farm and asking you for it."

(_We got a love and respect for each other that binds us together like glue. Us Dukes is one._)

The thing is, Bo never asks for extra space, in fact he abhors it like nature abhors a vacuum. He does everything he can to fill up any gaps that might open and it's Luke that has to find his own quiet from time to time. And, he has to admit, he's about as graceful about how he does it as Bo was yesterday morning.

"And you can't go trying to help him get better because you feel guilty about him getting hurt in the first place – and I know you do."

(_So just put 'em up. Just go ahead, put 'em up, put 'em up, put 'em up_.)

"You ain't responsible for what happened, Luke. There you go, Bonnie-girl," she mumbles in there, pulling the milk bucket out from under the goat and holding it up in the air for him to take. He accepts it and steps back so she can stand up. "You tried," she's on her feet and looking him in the eye, now. "Everything you could think to stop him from going off with Diane and from making that jump. Heck, you even almost lost the General to the crusher over protecting him." But he didn't and now where is the General? At Cooter's, still in the same shape he was after Luke banged the dents out of a couple of his quarter panels. In other words, he's a mess. "You didn't do this to him, Luke." She grabs his shoulders like she's Uncle Jesse, trying to shake some sense into him. About all she's likely to accomplish is making him spill Bonnie Mae's milk. "And you can't go at him now like you broke him and so it's your job to fix him. The only way he's going to heal and get stronger is if that's what he wants. You can't want it for him."

(_'Cause I'll tell you what. I ain't about to stand aside and see my family thrown apart by a couple of hotheads that think that they ain't got no more sense than a chicken raiding a fox's den._)

"So you go back there," she finishes, taking the milk from him. "And you spend time with him. But give him a break, too. Go off and do some of them other things you like to do besides looking after the farm and looking after him. He'll still be there when you get done. And he'll be plenty happy to see you, too, because he'll have been missing you when you're gone." And with that, she turns on those pointy little heels and picks her way across the farmyard and up the porch steps into the house.

* * *

It's two mornings after their squabble when Luke finally shows up again. Bo wonders if he should apologize, but Luke starts asking him questions before he can.

"How are you feeling?"

He has to ask himself if Luke has asked that question of him at any time during this whole mess. He's pretty sure the answer is no. "Okay."

"How's the hip? Sore?"

Only at night, but Doc Petticord has the staff here loosening the tension of the contraption he's hooked up to a little at nine o'clock each evening so it won't bother him so much. Then it gets tightened again with morning rounds.

"It's okay."

"Well, you got anything you want to work on?"

Bo almost wants to ask this stranger what he has done with his jackass cousin.

"Listen, if you do, we got to get at it, because I only got an hour. I promised Cooter I'd be at the garage to help him work on the General by eleven."

The General. He's been so busy feeling sorry for himself that he's forgotten to check how progress is coming on repairing the General. Maybe he just assumed the car was too bad off to ever really get fixed, and maybe he didn't want to know.

"He's salvageable then?"

"Salvageable? He'll be fine," Luke dismisses with a wave of his hand through the air. "Gonna take some work, though. That's why I can't be here as much as I used to be."

Bo's not sure he likes the sound of that, Luke not being here as much. "Luke."

"It ain't," Luke says, and the cheerful tone he's been using up until now drops. His cousin looks him right in the eyes. "Because I don't want to be here, Bo. You know that. It's just that it's better for both of us if I spend some time working on the General, too."

"I—I understand," he agrees, and just like that, it gets dropped.

"So what's it going to be?" Luke's eyeing the chair next to his bed like he's trying to decide whether they're going to work or goof off.

Bo settles for something in between.

"How about a little arm work?" he asks, putting his right arm up into arm wrestling position. "It's been a while since I whupped your tail."

Luke tips his head a little to the side and presses his lips together. _You ain't never whupped my tail_, the gesture says.

"Well, get that chair up here," Bo commands. "Unless you're chicken."

"I ain't chicken, and you're a dead duck," Luke assures him, as he sits then shuffles the chair forward with a few stutter scrapes against the floor.

Bo starts bawking at him and Luke counts them off – _three, two, one_. From there it's as serious an arm wrestling match as the Duke boys have ever engaged in. Which means there's a lot of laughter in there, too.

And when Luke stays an hour longer than he said he would, both of them pretend not to notice.

"See you tomorrow," his cousin promises, then walks out the door.


	12. An Elephant with an Ingrown Toenail

**12. An Elephant with an Ingrown Toenail  
**

Luke rubs his hands together and blows on them, though he knows it's not really going to make them any warmer. The only thing that might help now is a pair of gloves or putting his hands to work, but neither's really practical at the moment, when Cooter's in the middle of the garage, engaged in some sort of silent communion with the General, and Luke's not invited into the discussion.

So he stands aside and tucks his hands into his armpits, waiting for the verdict. Watches his breath curl out in front of him, and this is the meanest Halloween cold snap that Hazzard has experienced in his lifetime. He can only imagine how many kids will be trick-or-treating heavy coats and hats, telling everyone who asks that they are dressed as 'Yankees.' It's a good thing he and Jesse spent the last week and a half pulling in what crops they could. It wasn't a big year, but with a few diligent hunts and maybe a couple trucking jobs here and there, they'll be all right until spring.

"Lukas," Cooter says at last. First word he's spoken to his human companion instead of the car in a good half hour. "Them wheels is perfectly aligned. That frame is straight as a loblolly pine." A slow grin spreads across the mechanic's dirty face, making him look like a naughty little boy.

"Well, all right!" Luke answers back, offering one of his cold hands up for a slap that turns into a hug, because Cooter's just too happy to hold it in. And maybe Luke doesn't mind his friend being this excited when it's been such a long and hard road to get here.

"You're just lucky," Cooter says, turning him loose, "that I'm so good at body work."

"Yeah, well, I figure letting you fix him was generosity on my part." Cooter's chin dips in doubt that Luke's been anything like charitable toward him. "Since me and Bo ain't been making Rosco and Cletus break their cars for a couple of months now, I reckon you needed the work."

"And the pay."

Yeah, well, they can both thank Zimbra and Southern Counties Insurance for that. They've seen to it that the full expense of fixing Bo's leg and the General's frame (as well as the lesser damages to both) has been paid for.

"Don't let this spoil you none," Luke warns. Because it doesn't take a gambler to know what a sure bet it is that the General will be getting banged up again sometime in the future. Or to realize that next time, the Duke boys aren't going to have enough money to pay Cooter a whole lot for the repairs.

"Are you gonna let him down," off the flatbed lift that the General's up on, sitting about four feet off the floor, "so we can put him back together?"

Because somewhere around the time that Luke came back into the project of putting his and Bo's wrecked car back together a few weeks ago, their friend had figured out that they needed to strip him down just about to the chassis and start straightening out his K-frame and both frame rails. Not to mention the driver's side front wheel well, and putting in a new front axle. While Cooter's been dealing with that, Luke's been left to the easier task of banging out all the dents.

And on days when neither of them could stand to look at body damage for one more minute, they replaced the carburetor, the starter, the coil wire, the fuel filter and every bit of the fuel line. Then they tracked down wires with melted housings and they detailed all the soot and fire extinguisher residue out of the engine compartment.

In short, about all that's left to do is put him back together and paint him, and even that's going to take too long for Luke's interests.

"Give me a minute, buddy, just a minute to admire my fine handiwork." Cooter begins his walk around the car, stopping at each corner to lean back and double check that the angles are all just as perfect as he thinks they are. "How's Bo?" he asks to distract Luke from how long it's taking.

"Kind of stiff, but Doc got him on his feet yesterday. Or on crutches anyway. Couldn't stay up too long because he got dizzy, but everyone says that will get better." And that his cast won't seem so heavy when he gets used to gravity's pull on his upright body. But Luke kind of doubts that part. There's no way to have plaster covering you from your hip to your toes and not feel the weight of it. At least the one on his arm came off earlier in the week, though his thumb's still a bit tender. Which ought to make him take it easy on those crutches, but he's Bo. He's only got one speed and it sure isn't slow and steady.

Still, he's finally out of traction after a little over six weeks, and able to move around some. Heading off into the closet of a bathroom on his own made him almost giddily happy, even if there was barely room in there for both him and his crutches.

"They've got him in a double occupancy room now, finally. I feel sorry for his roommate." Who is pleasant enough, but probably doesn't want to be blabbered at all day as he prepares for his gall bladder removal. Older guy named Dan, maybe in his forties, and he most likely wishes he felt well enough to get up and shove a hospital gown into Bo's mouth.

Cooter laughs in agreement. "Bet he's happy to be coming home."

Yeah, he is. Not today, because they want to watch how he adjusts to being upright for a little longer, but sometime tomorrow. And Luke would really like the General to be ready in time to pick him up, but he's resigned himself to the fact that that's an impossible task.

"All right," the mechanic says, walking over to the concrete wall at the side of the bay they've been working in and hitting the button that will bring the lift back to floor level. "We're ready to go."

Luke rubs his hands together again. If Cooter were to ask, he'd swear that he was only warming them, but they would both know it's a lie. Luke's hands are as eager as the rest of him to get to work.

"Just, when we get the doors on, let's not weld them yet," he proposes. "It's gonna be awhile before Bo can climb in through the window."

The lift lets out a final hiss of air, and the car stands in front of him, naked, but in solid condition again.

* * *

There are beautiful goose bumps prickling up on his skin, his cheeks are tingling and his nose is numb. It's the best he's felt in almost two months.

"You sure?" Luke asks him, because he's just let loose with a full-out shiver and they aren't even out of the hospital parking lot yet. Twenty glorious, chilly miles to go to get home, and Luke wants to put Dixie's top up and turn on the heat. What a dumb idea that is, when there's fresh air out here. It's bad enough that Bo's been bundled into that lumpy brown coat that never did fit him right. He swears to himself that every winter is the last one he'll wear it, and then come spring he puts it back into his closet because there's no hope. He can't afford to replace it, so it'll come out again the following fall. "It's pretty cold."

Yes, in the same way that ice cream is cold. Deliciously, wonderfully cold.

And his cousin's been fussing about it from the moment Shirley wheeled Bo out to the jeep in one of those flimsy hospital wheelchairs that he's too big for anyway. "Hospital policy," she'd said when he tried to tell her he could get out there just fine on his crutches. "Sit. Don't give me a hard time or I'll swat your behind." So he'd sat with his leg straight out in front of him and she'd pushed him down the hallway and out the sliding doors, hollering warnings to anyone walking in front of them. Luke had pulled Dixie around to the main doors so she didn't have to go far with him. Then after he'd, with a good bit of help from Luke, slid the passenger seat all the way back, hauled himself in and tossed the crutches into the back seat, she'd buckled him in, shaken her head about the mode of transportation, and kissed him on the cheek. "Don't give your family a hard time," she'd whispered in his ear. "You're luckier than most."

And then she'd been nothing but a sturdy white speck in the side view mirror as Luke drove him away.

So he's decided not to worry too much about the way Luke's mother-henning over him and his shivering body. "It feels good," he insists and Luke shrugs, cranking the wheel left to get them out onto the access road that'll lead to State Route 29. And though the kudzu is dying back and the leaves have mostly fallen to the ground in brown heaps, it's still a colorful feast to his eyes, which haven't seen a whole lot more than the yellow hospital walls and white bed sheets in longer than he likes to think about.

"Look," he says, pointing upward at an irregular V that makes its way across the sky. "Geese!"

To his credit, Luke does look up and tries to act like he cares. But as far as his cousin is concerned, migrating geese don't mean much of anything unless he figures he can bag one, then convince Daisy to roast it. Bo can remember what it's like to take the world around him for granted, so he doesn't blame Luke. But he keeps right on noticing everything that whizzes past. Even the mailboxes along the side of the road, which he usually sees as obstacles to off-roading, seem especially interesting today. Then there's the smell of rotting leaves and woodsmoke dancing by on the breeze.

"If you want," Luke hollers over the wind and road noise. "We can stop by Cooter's and you can see the General. He's almost back together, then we just have to paint him again."

"No thanks, Luke. I—I'd just as soon go home. I'm a little tired."

That, apparently, was a mistake. There are Luke's worried eyes, watching him instead of the road in front of them. For only a moment, then his cousin's looking for a place to pull over to the side.

"I'm gonna put the top on," he insists. "You don't look so good." And before he can fight it, Luke's got them off on the rough shoulder in between a couple of stands of trees, while the cars zip past on their left.

"I'm fine," he insists, but Luke's hand feels his forehead anyway. Like he's going to be able to tell anything when the cold wind's been whipping against Bo's skin. "I ain't sick."

"I don't like your color." Yeah, well, Bo can't claim that he's always a big fan of Luke's either, but by this time both of their summer tans have faded and they're probably equally as pale as one another. And Luke's out of the vehicle and into that back compartment where the cloth roof is stored before Bo can register another complaint. "Won't take but a minute," he promises.

It's not so terrible, really. Once the top is on and the heat is turned up a bit, Luke lets him leave the window open all the same. The air smells like deer hunts and long hikes, camping under the stars and if he closes his eyes his cast is gone and he and Luke are running together over the hills toward home.

* * *

_Ka-thump! Ka-thump! Ka-thump!_

"Bo's up." Yeah, no kidding. He's pretty sure the whole county already knows that, and half of Chickasaw, too. Maybe Jesse thinks announcing it will be fair warning to the breakfast Daisy's cooking that it's about to get devoured. As it is, she's at the stove tending to the equivalent of a six course meal in various states of readiness for eating.

_Ka-thump! Ka-thump!_

Bo's on his way to the bathroom. Funny how Jesse doesn't feel terribly compelled to broadcast that. Maybe because it's not proper kitchen table talk, or maybe because it needs no announcement.

Luke looks up at the ceiling; he'd swear a little plaster dust drops in time with each _thump_ that follows after a_ ka_.

"Maybe we ought to reinforce the floor," he suggests.

"Maybe you ought to just drink your coffee and hold your peace," Jesse counters from the head of the table and Daisy bites her lip to keep a straight face. The oldster rustles the newspaper that he pretends to read every morning. Mostly, Luke figures, it's just a prop he can peer over the top of and scold his kids.

Luke sips and waits, figures Daisy must have already slowed her cooking process, because once Bo gets into the bathroom, he won't be back out until his hair is perfect. Of course, he'll be still wearing his pajamas. Which will get him sent ka-thumping back to their bedroom to get decent, or as much as possible for a man who can only manage half a pair of pants. He's been rotating between two pairs of old jeans, stretched and widened by heavy use (and bought in high school, when he still carried a little baby fat) and cut off short on the left side so they can make it over his unforgiving cast. Luke will most likely get hollered for after about two and a half minutes, when Bo gets sick of trying to get his pants on by himself.

Five days of the same routine, but he has to let it play out by itself. Luke wakes Bo up, then goes out after the morning chores. Jesse helps with those and Bo goes right back to sleep. The second round begins when Luke goes back into the bedroom and wakes Bo again. This time he stays until his cousin is sitting up and grumbling the sort of words that would get him eating soap if Jesse heard them. Luke leaves him alone with his usual morning foul mood, and comes out for a cup of coffee. The ka-thumping heads to the bathroom, then back to the bedroom and eventually Bo asks for help. Anticipating the need only gets Luke yelled at and makes Bo more stubborn about what he can do – _by myself!_ as he used to yell when he was about four and one heck of a lot cuter – and sets breakfast back by another fifteen minutes. So for now, Luke just sips and keeps one ear cocked toward the bedroom for his cue.

"Maybe," Jesse pipes up again in that tone that announces that 'maybe' is a stand in for 'do what I say and no arguing.' "You ought to take Bo with you into town to pick up them rolls of barbed wire from the hardware store."

"Don't reckon he can help me haul them into the trunk," he mumbles, then brings his cup of coffee to his lips. Realizes a second too late that he should have reversed the sequence. If he had, he would have had time to consider the lack of wisdom in answering back.

"Do you need him to?" Jesse's eyes run the line from his head to his hip, looking for open wounds or missing appendages, which would be his only excuse for not being able to lift a couple of coils of wire by himself.

No, he doesn't need Bo's help. It's just that usually Bo helps him whether he needs it or not.

_Ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump._ Bo can manipulate around pretty well on those crutches, but he sounds about as graceful as an elephant with an ingrown toenail.

"I reckon it might be nice for him to get to town," Luke says, rather than answer a question that was hardly serious to begin with. "All them girls that ain't seen him since September will probably flock around him." And even if Bo's been plenty cheerful (mornings aside) these last few days anyway, there's nothing that'll make him happier than a few young ladies fawning over his injuries. "Heck, I bet I can drive him out to the north line, after," which is the border of the Duke property that needs some fresh barbed wire to replace the section where Rosco's cruiser hit it with a dissonant chord that would have made an out-of-tune guitar jealous. "And he can sit out there on the hood and watch me work. Do him good to get off the porch."

"There ya go," Jesse approves.

Not that Bo's complained once about spending his time on the porch. It's what he's wanted to do, and since the days have warmed up by a good fifteen degrees since that afternoon Luke brought him home, everyone's been content to let him stay there, smelling the fall air and talking to the chickens. It keeps him out of the way.

It also gives him a chance to look at the General Lee, who Luke brought home two days ago, with his straight and smooth body and his fresh coat of paint. Bo's eyes brightened to see him, but he hasn't gotten any closer to him than the edge of the porch, hasn't touched him yet. Today seems like as good a day as any to get out for a little ride together in him, even if it's just into town and back.

"Luke!"

Daisy giggles, Jesse looks up at the ceiling for patience (or maybe in search of his lost mornings of quiet) and Luke gets up to complete the daily routine.

"Five minutes," he states as his goal for how long it'll take the two of them to get back. So far this week they haven't made it in under seven.

But they've gotten something of a rhythm to how they go about getting Bo dressed, or at least his cousin has given in to the simple logic that the short leg of the jeans has to be pulled on before he can even think of getting to the long leg, so they make record time. When Bo ka-thumps up to the table with Luke behind him about six minutes later, the table is filled with an assortment of breakfast treats that would be enough to fill a horse's stomach. Bo grins like it's Christmas morning.

"Thanks, Daisy!" he says and that's exactly why she's been doing it every day.

Luke stands behind Bo's chair as he plops down, so it won't slide out from under him, then joins the rest of the family at the table. There's the usual battle of wills when the food proves more important to Bo than thanking the Lord, but Jesse's still indulgent enough that no one's hands get slapped. Then the eating commences and there's hardly even any room for breathing with the way they're stuffing their mouths, much less talking. At least during the first helping. Things slow down a bit during seconds.

"So, Bo," Luke says when he has (mostly) swallowed his mouthful. Gets a cocked eyebrow from Jesse that reminds him that he's perfectly healthy and his uncle won't think twice about smacking _him_. "I was figuring we could go into town and pick up them rolls of barbed wire, then we could drive out to the north line and you could keep me company while I string it up. You can sit in the car, so you'd be plenty comfortable. Heck, we can bring Daisy's tape recorder out with us and listen to her new Waylon tape if you want." Then, because he doesn't want a purse shaped bruise across his cheek, he adds, "That is, if that's okay with you, Daisy."

"Of course, sugar." She's mostly being agreeable because it's Bo he's doing it for, and he knows it. "I'll even make y'all a picnic lunch."

"That's great, Daisy," Bo says and Luke notices that although he has neither completely chewed nor swallowed all of his food, Jesse doesn't do anything more than listen to this part the discussion with quiet content. "But can you be without Dixie all day? I thought you had to work."

"I figured we'd take the General," Luke jumps in. In fact, it never occurred to him to consider any alternative.

"Luke," Bo complains like it's the worst idea he's ever had. Which is ridiculous, really. Luke's had some really lousy ideas in his time, and this one's just sort of run-of-the-mill, uninventive. Hardly a plan at all, more of a habit. When the Duke boys go somewhere, they drive the General Lee. "I can't sit in the General."

Luke uses the edge of his toast to scoop the last of his eggs onto his fork. They've pretty much decimated Daisy's meal, and he's so full he really couldn't much care about the picnic lunch Daisy's promised to make them, but he knows he'll change his mind once he gets to working that fence line.

"I told you," he reminds Bo. "Me and Cooter didn't weld them doors, so as long as the seat's all the way back, you should be able to get in there." He stuffs the eggs into his mouth.

Meanwhile, Bo has quit eating all together. Which is a pretty serious state of affairs, considering that there are still eggs and bacon on his plate. Bo Duke has never left a single strip of bacon unmolested in his life. "I ain't going to be comfortable for me to sit that low."

Now, that's interesting. The General's seat isn't any lower than the couch is, and Bo's sat there several times over the last few days without complaining. But so far, he hasn't been further from the house than the front porch.

Luke shrugs like it makes no difference to him. "Daisy, you want to switch cars for the day?" he asks.

She squints at him a little, like she's trying to figure out what he's up to. He just holds her gaze steadily. Bo is watching them both and would catch any kind of gesture he made to get her to just say yes.

"I reckon," she says, finally.

"So how's that, Bo? You up for a little time in town, then out at the fence line?"

"Sure," Bo agrees with half a shrug and goes back to scarfing down his food.

All right, then. It's not town or the fields that Bo's avoiding. It's the General Lee.


	13. Reclamation

**13. Reclamation **

"You about ready, sugar?"

Sure, why not. He's already dug that boxy brown coat out of his closet, and he's got his blanket, too. He might feel like a small child that's about to be put down for naptime, but he's ready to go.

"Have a good time," Jesse calls when he hands Daisy the blanket, plants the base of his crutches into the floor, and pulls himself up off the couch. As if they're headed off for some ice cream and a movie.

It's Monday, which is Daisy's day off from work, but she's perfectly glad to drive him over to Tri-County Hospital for his outpatient physical therapy sessions with Philip, who has a bunch of doctory-sounding letters that follow his last name, though you'd never guess it to look at him. Stoop shouldered, pudgy-faced, funny little glasses perched on his nose and he's not a lot older than Bo, either. But apparently he's been through a lot of schooling, and ever since Bo's lower leg emerged, pasty white, skinny and scarred, from under its cast, Philip's been seeing him three times a week. Mostly he just applies heat and cold, massages Bo's muscles or uses some kind of stimulation pads to make Bo's leg feel better, then manipulates the knee and ankle to keep him mobile. Maybe, if he's got time, he'll sit Bo at the rowing machine and let him work on his arm strength. When the rest of his cast comes off in another week, the two of them will get serious about rehabilitation, using all the equipment that litters the exercise room like a twisted version of the high school weight room. (But he bets that even then, what Philip does will be a lot tamer than what Luke would have him do if he got his way.)

"You all right to get up there, sugar?" Daisy asks him after they've gotten outside to the farmyard and he's tossed his crutches into the back of Dixie.

"I'm good," he assures her, and wonders what she'd do if he said he wasn't. Does she imagine she can lift him? To keep them both from thinking too hard about the alternatives, he hops up onto the side step and turns on one foot to get himself into the seat. "See?"

Daisy smirks at him for showing off, hands him the blanket to put over his legs for the drive and walks over to her own side to get in. It's not a terribly cold day, but he's still wearing his stupid half-jean things with the short left side, and it'll get good and windy once they get moving. Philip doesn't like him to be cold when he gets to the office in the east wing of the hospital, even if the first thing the therapist does might just be applying ice. Philip may not be as rough as Luke is with him, but he's just as picky.

Dixie's engine revs, and then they're bouncing along on their way, Daisy singing tunelessly to whatever song she's got in her head. She's grateful for the excuse to drive out this way each Monday; while he's rehabilitating himself, she's wandering the streets of nearby Capital City, spending a week's worth of tips on makeup and shoes.

Most Wednesdays, Jesse is the one taking him to Tri-County. It's a quieter trip for the most part, but sometimes his uncle can get to telling old moonshiner's tales that make Bo miss those nights of running, blacked out and with only starlight to guide him, in old Tilly. Jesse's grateful that Bo's getting so much post-injury care. They would never be able to afford it on their own, but Southern Counties Insurance Company has seen to it that Bo's medical bills are covered until he's fully healed.

Bo's just grateful that it's not Friday, which is when Luke takes him to Tri-County. Not because he minds being with Luke or even because he minds the way Luke actually stays for the rehab session, watching Philip's techniques with a careful eye that won't tolerate anyone else hurting Bo. Not for any good reason that he can give.

But it's Monday now, and he doesn't have to worry about it right this minute anyway. Luke's taken the General off with him to camp and hunt for a day or two while the weather holds. Bo's medical bills may be paid, but the family's still got to eat.

And that's half of why he's so motivated to go to all of his physical therapy sessions, even if they are inconvenient and kind of annoying all at once. Every part of healing has taken so much of his time and by now all he wants is to walk on his own two feet again, to be free to do all the things he used to do, all the things he wants.

And one of the things he wants most of all is to be equal to Luke again, to spend time with his cousin without pain, without Luke's worry.

But the one thing he doesn't want, and he can't explain it so he doesn't try, is to drive around in the General Lee. And he has until Friday before he has to face Luke's disappointment as once again, they take Dixie or the pickup to Tri-County instead.

* * *

"Come on, Bo."

_Ka-thump_ has been replaced by a simple thud, thud, thud that moves easily and quickly through the house, the farmyard, the barn. As long, that is, as there's no frost on the grass, in which case, Bo gets grounded by Jesse and kept inside. _Last thing we need is for you to slip out there and come down hard on that leg, boy._ Luke enforces Jesse's rule because he agrees with it whole-heartedly. Sometimes the old man is perceptive.

And sometimes, Luke would swear, everyone else in his family has their heads firmly buried in the sand.

The rest of Bo's cast came off before Thanksgiving. He's still on crutches because the physical therapy team at Tri-County doesn't want him fully bearing weight on his left leg until he can do so with an even gait, but otherwise he's completely mobile. Even if he's still on light duty chores.

"Bo, will you get a move on?"

"Luke," Jesse mumbles from his kitchen chair, working his way through his third cup of coffee (and that alone ought to go to prove that it's not a good day to be working his nerves) and the morning paper. Doing better with the former than the latter, too. "Ain't I told you more times than I can count not to go yelling in the house?" Well, he could step outside and holler for Bo, but that's not going to be terribly efficient. "Besides, you got time."

That's an interesting thing for a man who hasn't consulted a clock or watch to say. The fact that he happens to be right only makes it more annoying.

"Jesse," he asks in a carefully quieter voice, one that's not complaining or accusing. Just curious, really, no big deal. "You ever notice how he don't drag his feet when it's you or Daisy taking him?" Three days a week, Bo gets taken to his physical therapy sessions at Tri-County, and yet it's only on Fridays that he has to be prodded like Maudine during spring plowing. Heck, on Mondays he's practically begging Daisy to quit fussing over her makeup and get on the road already.

His uncle's face barely changes from its impassive stare at the newspaper, but just for a second his lip curls at the corner. Apparently it's amusing that Bo keeps Luke waiting and no one else. "Maybe he just don't care for Fridays all that much."

Now that's actually funny. Friday mornings become Friday nights at the Boar's Nest quicker than a coyote in pursuit of a lame rabbit, and Bo's been getting plenty of attention from the girls when they've been out there the last few weeks. Heck, now that his cast is gone, his crutches are nearly black with the signatures and phone numbers of just about every single young lady over the age of eighteen within the tri-county region.

"He ain't got a problem with Fridays."

"Maybe he's got a problem with you, then," Jesse suggests, that curl playing at his lips again.

Luke quits leaning against the counter and trying to peer around the corner at his own bedroom door to come and sit at the table with his uncle.

"Jesse," he says, hesitates. Because it has occurred to him before that it might just be him that Bo's got the problem with. It's hard to know how much to push his cousin, when to let up. Coming on too strong got him kicked out of the hospital, heck, telling Bo what to do led to this whole mess to begin with. If he could have found some better way to warn Bo about Diane and her carnival, maybe his cousin would have listened. Maybe he wouldn't have marched away from his family, stubbornly determined to prove himself capable or die trying. Luke knows that Bo can get enough of being bossed around by a know-it-all older cousin. He just doesn't think that's the case this time. "Don't you think it's strange that Bo ain't interested in the General?"

Because that's the delay. When Daisy takes him to his rehabilitation, Bo hops right up into the jeep's passenger seat, and when Jesse takes him, he doesn't hesitate to make the climb into the pickup. But sitting down into the General, which would be comparatively easy, he won't do. Which makes Friday mornings tricky since Luke invests a lot of effort into trying to get Bo into his own car before giving up and taking the jeep instead. He and Daisy have already switched keys this morning; he knows he's going to be taking her car. But he's going to try to get Bo into the General anyway, and Bo's going to refuse. No explanation will be offered, he'll just insist on another vehicle.

The old man finally puts down his newspaper, folding it in half. That's the unofficial signal that he's done looking at it for the day.

"I saw him out there with you the other day, poking around the General's engine," Jesse points out as evidence to disprove what Luke's telling him. But it doesn't wash.

"I figured if he helped me change the oil," which didn't need changing when the car's barely been driven since he was put back together a little more than a month back. "He'd see for himself that the General's in perfect condition. Perfect! And he still won't get in. I tried to take him for a ride that same afternoon and he refused. Gave me some story about needing to clean out the chicken coop. Jesse, Bo ain't volunteered for chicken coop duty a day in his life!"

"Well," Jesse says in that same noncommittal voice he'd use to talk to a revenuer that's asked him a direct question. _ I'm not going to lie, but I'm not going to tell you anything of consequence, either. _"I reckon if you was in a car accident that near-about killed you, you might be a little skittish about getting into a car, too."

Maybe, but this wasn't an accident, and it didn't happen while Bo was driving down the road to Tri-County Hospital, either. "He ain't skittish getting into a car. He gets into the pickup or Daisy's car just fine. It's just the General." The car that Bo's done everything from running into trees to flipping over onto its roof in the past, and never hesitated once to go right back to driving him in all the craziest ways possible. "Jesse, he loves the General. Heck, he ought to be fighting me to drive him by now."

"Maybe so," his uncle allows. "But it ain't up to you or me to decide what he's feeling. He's the only one who knows for sure." Jesse reaches across the table to pat Luke's hands in a gesture that's somewhere between comforting him and telling him to hush up now. "You just go out and get in Dixie, and I'll send him along to you so you ain't late for his physical therapy. And leave him be for now, Luke. He'll come around when he's of a mind to."

* * *

"How's the leg, Bo?" Uncle Jesse's behind him when he expected Luke. Makes him jump a little to hear the wrong voice.

"Fine," he answers, though his head's got a lump on it from where he banged it against the underside of the tractor's frame in his surprise. He rubs it, figures about all he's accomplishing is getting grease in his hair.

"That ground's mighty cold. I reckon it could set up some aches and pains if you lie on it too long." Yeah, it probably could. And if he's completely honest, he was already a little stiff this morning when he got out of bed. But Philip and Doc Petticord both told him that he'll have days like that and that the most important thing he can do is to make sure he's walking right, with an even gait. If he starts to limp, he could wind up putting too much weight where it doesn't belong and hurt himself all over again. Otherwise, he's completely approved to be off his crutches and to do light work around the farm. It's been almost five whole months since he hurt himself and he's come a long way in that time.

"We're only a few weeks from planting," Bo reasons. "I reckon we'll all be happier if me and Luke get this condenser replaced before then. Where is old Luke, anyways? He's supposed to be down here helping me."

"Sent him off to town," is the vague answer he gets. "He'll be back in a while. In the meantime, I can help you."

Suddenly there's a shadow blocking what little light he was getting from the low angle of the late winter sun. He turns his head and looks in that direction to see two fat knees.

"I got it, Uncle Jesse." There's no need for the old man to be getting down on the ground, and there's no room for two of them under here anyway. "Once I get this nut off," but the bolt is stripped, so it's giving him one heck of a fight, "I'll be coming out anyway."

"Here, try this," Jesse says, passing a socket wrench under the tractor's frame. Which is silly; Bo doesn't need a socket wrench, he's got a crescent wrench that would be just fine if Jesse would get out of his light and let him work in peace. He could get some muscle behind his efforts and—

"Take it, boy," doesn't allow him any room for arguments, so he huffs, drops the crescent wrench onto his own chest, and grabs what his uncle offers. He's surprised to find that the head fits perfectly over the hex nut he's been working on, and more than that, when he cranks the socket wrench a few times, he finds that the bolt's not stripped after all. Just stubborn and maybe a little bit rusty. (Which explains why Jesse knew the solution to getting it loose. One cantankerous oldster dealing on an even par with another.) "I've got a lifetime of fixing this tractor," and though it sounds like an exaggeration, it's probably true. Bo would not be surprised to learn that the tractor's older than his uncle. "I know a trick or two by now."

"Yes, sir. Thank you."

"Yep," Jesse says, and now he's sitting out there, his rump in the dirt like he's a tow-headed kid instead of a silver-haired senior. "It's coming on planting time." Bo wouldn't be surprised to find him out there with a glass of lemonade, just passing the time like he would on the porch. Talking to keep himself company, and maybe as a side bonus, keeping Bo company, too. "You know what else it's coming to be?" Strange, that his uncle's holding this conversation in this particular place and time, that's what.

"What?" he grunts when it becomes clear that the conversation is not as one-way as it initially appeared. He's got the nut free now, so he puts it and the socket wrench onto his chest with the crescent wrench, and slowly starts to drag himself out from under the tractor. It's not exactly a natural movement, kind of like doing the elementary backstroke backwards in the dust without putting too much strain on his left hip.

"Racing season."

He hits his head on the undercarriage of the tractor again, this time to the tune of a metallic clang.

"Maybe you ought to take a break for a while, boy," Jesse remarks. "Come on out here and sit with me for a while." In the dirt. Maybe Jesse figures that if some neighbor happens by, it'll seem normal that he's sitting in the dust of his farmyard, as long as Bo's by his side, doing the same thing.

He takes the hardware and tools off his chest and offers them out to his uncle. At least if he's not trying to balance them while he shimmies around down here, he might make his way back out sometime before summer.

Instead of taking the tools, Jesse grabs his wrist and pulls. He has to duck his head quick before he gets clobbered a third time. If he manages to get himself a concussion while fixing the tractor, he'll be in bed for a month and won't be allowed to work on the equipment anymore.

"You hear what I said?" Jesse asks him when he's completely free, sitting up and trying to dust himself off. Most of where he's dirty is on his back, though, and he won't get that clean until he gets into the shower.

"I'm taking a break," he defends. At least for a minute or two, he can indulge his old uncle. The sooner the old man figures out that it's ridiculous for the two of them to sit out here like this, the sooner Bo can get that condenser changed out.

"That's good. But that ain't what I was asking about." Jesse's meaty hand fluffs through the back of Bo's hair, dislodging whatever amount of dust it can, then brushes along his back. "I was talking about how it's almost race season. That prize money you bring in each spring is as important as the planting, you know."

He huffs. "Uncle Jesse, you reckon if me and Luke did extra hunting and fishing this spring, we could get by without that racing money?"

"Well," Jesse says, shifting around to get more comfortable. Bo would like to wish him luck in that endeavor. They haven't had rain in at least a few weeks, and under the top layer of dust, the ground's about as forgiving as granite. "I reckon we could, but do you figure that'd be fair to you? Or to Luke?"

Bo shrugs. "I don't much feel like racing anymore." He grabs hold of the side of the tractor to haul himself up, but Jesse puts a hand on his wrist again. It's his good wrist, probably feels solid in Jesse's hand. The other arm is still smaller and a little soft to the touch. He really needs to build more muscle there. But mostly it's his left leg that needs to be strengthened. He's gotten a full round of rehabilitation, though. From here on, it's up to him.

"Don't walk off on me, boy."

"I ain't," he says, though that was his precise intention. "But do you figure we could get off the ground?"

With a lot of grunting, and pulling – he figures it's only luck that they don't roll the tractor over onto themselves with the amount of weight they put on it pulling themselves up – the two of them manage to find their feet.

"Now you know what it's like to be old," is Jesse's estimation of the situation. "Aches and pains when you sit too long or in the wrong place. Ain't much fun, is it?"

He reckons he's been a bit less than sympathetic about his uncle's rheumatism and other maladies up until now. "I guess it ain't."

"Then why would you want to give up on your youth already?"

_Very clever, old man._

"I ain't. I just don't feel like racing no more, is all. And I reckon if Luke still wants to race without me, there ain't nothing stopping him."

"Boy," Jesse's arm tries as hard as it can to reach all the way across his shoulders, but it hasn't been able to manage it since he was about sixteen or so, when he got too tall and too broad for the old man. "I reckon you might have a point." There gets to be a little pressure behind that arm around his back: _walk with me_. "Luke probably don't want to race without you. Just about everything he does in the car, he does because you're along with him. Oh, he loves it, but not for the sake of winning or for jumping or even for getting Rosco's goat." _And don't pretend you've never deliberately riled Rosco, either_, the sly look on his face says. Jesse's nonverbals are in fine form this morning. No wonder he wanted Bo out from under the tractor where he could see him. "He just enjoys being with you, when you're doing what you love." Seems like he's being led to the porch. That's just as well, the cushioned chair he used to sit on when he was first home and wearing that heavy cast is still out here. "Now, sometimes he's kind of possessive of that, like when you was wanting to go off and have fun with Diane instead of with him."

"Jesse, I don't want to talk about Diane." She's still a sore point with him, and probably with Luke, too.

"All right," Jesse agrees, and he doesn't stop to sit on the porch, but heads for the door. Pulls it open and gestures for Bo to get inside first. "We'll leave it at sometimes he's possessive of that. Why do you figure that is?"

He has a choice. He can pretend not to understand and then this little school lesson will drag out until dinner. Or he can recite the words he's supposed to. "Because he doesn't want to lose me." He steps through the door, Jesse behind him.

"That's right." His uncle pulls out one of the hard kitchen chairs for him, points to the seat. _Sit. Mind me. _ All the things Jesse isn't quite saying could fill a book bigger than their family bible. "And every time he goes off in the General alone – why just this morning, even, when I sent him to town," and Bo wonders whether or not Luke knows he was sent on a wild goose chase so Jesse could dole out this very lecture. "He feels like he's losing you." Bo sits, that wide finger points at him. _Stay._

"But—"

"You going to tell me you been in the General Lee in the three months since you got home from the hospital, Bo?" His uncle walks across the room, but looks back over his shoulder to make sure Bo's not deviating from his unspoken commands.

"No, I ain't." He sighs. There's no point in saying anything more until the lecture runs out of steam of its own accord.

"Now, I reckon maybe after what happened you're scared." The step stool gets pulled out of its little nook next to the refrigerator.

"I ain't scared." So much for holding his tongue.

"Worried then," Jesse says, dragging the stool over to the tall cabinet in the corner with one hand, while dismissing Bo' words with the other. "Whatever it is that you're feeling, I figure I can't blame you for it. And Luke don't neither. You asked me, back when you was laid up in the hospital, what would happen if you never did walk again, what Luke would do. The answer is, Luke's gonna love you anyway, and do whatever it takes to keep you happy." He sets the stool where he wants it and climbs up the first step, then the second. "So if whatever you're feeling makes you want to act like an old man, even though you ain't nothing more than a spring chicken, well, I reckon Luke will figure out how to accommodate that." Jesse's sorting through the various items he hides on top of that cabinet, and selects one. Climbs down with the small tube in his hand. "But I reckon you might want to ask yourself, after all the things Luke done for you when you was hurt, even the ones you didn't ask him to do and maybe didn't want him to do, is it fair for you to let yourself get so old that you can't still have fun with him?" His uncle tosses the tube at him, and he catches it out of reflex. Homemade cinnamon balm, for his sore parts. At least that's what Jesse – an old man – uses it for. "Now go on back to your bedroom and rub that on what hurts. And just think about what I said."

He's never really refused a direct order from his uncle before, so he thinks about it.

For the first day he thinks his uncle's probably just a sentimental old fool. Luke comes back from wherever he was sent, and he doesn't look too upset to be alone in the General Lee.

The second day he notices that, when Jesse sends them both to town to get a new radiator cap for the tractor, Luke doesn't even try to get him into their car. He just sort of sighs and heads for the pickup.

The third day it rains and the four of them stare out the windows and the mess of mud in their farmyard until Daisy goes to work. Then the three of them go right back to staring.

The fourth day he finds Luke out on the porch, sniffing the wet air like a hound dog. There's something that's piqued his interest, and Bo's got a pretty good idea what it is. Days that smell like this are fun for taking the General down to the grapevine and letting him slip around in the mud for a while. Bo once pulled a three-sixty turn down there. Luke always claimed he could manage it, too, but he never has. Today might be the day he could prove himself but, "Let's get to work," Luke says with a sigh, and heads out to the barn.

The morning of the fifth day, Bo's using one finger to trace the letters on the top of the car – he's always been partial to the G, with its swooping curve – when Luke comes up behind him.

"Want to go for a ride?" his cousin asks and the monotone in his voice makes Bo sad. Like Luke already figures the answer is no. And it is. Or it should be.

"Maybe a short one," Bo says, instantly regrets it. "Just out on our own property," he amends.

Luke nods, holds out the keys to him.

"No," he objects. "Uh, no thanks, Luke. You drive."

"Okay." Luke heads toward the driver's side, stops. Looks at how Bo hasn't moved. "The doors still ain't welded, if you want to get in that way."

Well, he doesn't want to get in any way at all, not really. But through the door might just be best, so he doesn't put too much pressure on his hip. He opens it up and looks inside. Just beige seats and dash board, smooth and clean. No blood, no glass, no fire.

"We don't got to," Luke offers, same as he always has. _We don't got to go fishing if you don't want to._ If it's too hot or too cold or just too nice a day to sit still, Luke's always been willing to wait until Bo's ready before they decide what to do with their day. But this isn't as simple as hunt today, fish tomorrow.

"It's okay," he mumbles. Doesn't move, and neither does his cousin. It's like some kind of silent standoff. It's up to Bo to take the first step.

He takes a deep breath, turns his body and sits down. Luke finishes walking around to the other side and slips in through the window. Just sits in the driver's seat and waits for him to close his door.

"It really ain't that important," Luke tries to tell him, but Bo waves him off. There's more room in here than he remembers, or maybe it's just that there's no smoke crowding him, no bent frame pressing in and caging him. He pulls the passenger side door shut, reminds himself that he can open it again any time he wants to.

Takes a deep breath, and, "Drive," he commands. Though it sounds more like a prayer.

The engine roars, and Bo pats the seat next to himself. Maybe he's asking the General to be kind to him, maybe he's apologizing for the trauma he put them both through.

"Ready?" Luke asks, and he doesn't want to talk anymore, so he just nods. He closes his eyes, hears the quiet rev as Luke gets them rolling. Then his ears pick up on the RPMs, and he knows the moment the General wants to go into second. Feels the small lurch of Luke shifting gears.

Opens his eyes to see the barn going by on the left – they haven't made it very far, though he'd swear his eyes have been closed for a full minute. He watches out the side window as they parallel the paddock and realizes that they really are going about as slow as the car can probably stand.

"You figure if we ride around the length of the property line, we might get home for dinner?" he asks. The land's big, but it's never taken them more than about fifteen minutes to get around the perimeter before.

Luke smirks at the windshield, but doesn't say anything. Just lets his foot lean a little heavier on the pedal and shoves the gearshift into third. They get through the tree line and Luke chooses the rutted lane that will take them out to the north forty. It's the place Luke taught him to drive, back when he was not yet street legal.

"Or maybe you figure tomorrow morning's breakfast is early enough."

Luke winds it up into fourth, and comes out through the tree line on the other side, with nothing but a big, wide field in front of them.

"You drive like someone's grandmother," he tells Luke.

That gets him the brakes, and they're stopped cold on the edge of the field.

"You figure you can do better?" Luke asks like this is any other day. "You want to drive?"

Yeah. Yeah he does.


	14. Everybody Loves a Carnival

_**Author's note:** So here's the end of another one. Thanks for reading and thanks especially to those who left reviews._

_I've got another one in the works - the first draft is done, but the rewrites are going to be extensive, so it'll probably be a couple of weeks before I manage to get it ready to go. And then I have about three half-baked ideas behind that (some of which will fully bake themselves, I'm sure), so I won't even play at a farewell speech. Besides, I've already given far too many of those, and none of them have turned out to be real. Alas, I am not as truthful as a Duke._

_As always, there's that whole not earning/never meaning no harm thing, and with that, I leave you to the end of this story._

* * *

**14. Everybody Loves a Carnival**

"Ooh, look," Daisy calls from his left. So his eyes follow where her outstretched finger points. But it's just the same Ring of Fire jump that Arlo's been doing for the past three years. Did it last year on that very same spot. Then again, maybe Daisy wasn't paying terribly close attention to Arlo a year ago. She might have had other concerns.

It wasn't as hard as he would have thought for him to talk his cousins into coming to see the carnival. Jesse begged off with generalities about taking care of the farm, and Luke took him aside and asked if he was sure, but now he and Daisy are sitting here on either side of him on the blazing hot aluminum of the Hazzard Fairgrounds bleachers, watching the Carnival of Thrills with him. Not quite a year to the day after they were last here, though they were sitting in three completely different places back then.

The signs started showing up in town a week ago. Just for the carnival itself, without any kind of a pre-show race or offer of a job. That little and at first it was too much. One late August morning when he and Luke were headed to Cooter's for their Saturday ritual of doughnuts and beer, there'd been a familiar yellow and orange poster. He drove past it before it sunk in what it was, and then went another block before he realized that it wasn't a year old, that it had to have gone up since they drove by that same telephone pole last Saturday.

He'd skidded to a stop, reversed direction and if Luke had started out asking him exactly what he thought he was doing driving like a crazy man in the middle of town, he'd shut up when they got back to that pole and Bo had pointed. "Oh," was all Luke'd had to say about the yellow splash of words, the black and white photo of Diane's face at the top.

At first Bo was mad that the carnival would come back here, that it would still be operating anywhere at all. Besides, he was still smarting from the fact that Carl had managed a plea to attempted manslaughter instead of attempted murder, which did away with his trial and the Dukes' chance to face him in court. Got himself locked up for five years in exchange for not having to take his chances with a jury.

When the residual anger over last year's events burned away, he was left with sadness about dreams broken, unfulfilled, left for dead. And by mid-week even that was gone and he'd decided he wanted to see the show. To see Diane, who had, when it came down to it, been as much a victim of Carl's sabotaging ways as any of them. To see what she remembered, what she felt, whether she had any regrets.

"He made it!" Daisy breathes, like it's some kind of a wonder. Of course he made it, Arlo's a professional and very good at what he does. He made it last year, too.

The carnival's not the same. Of course it's not; for one, Carl's gone, which leaves Diane's nasal voice to do all the announcing. There's still excitement, but it's not nearly as big or bright as it used to be. (Or maybe it just looks different from the stands.) There are a lot more motorcycle stunts now and hardly any cars here at all. Mostly junkers used as props.

Then again, the bikes are cheaper to purchase and repair, and Bo reckons that Diane must be feeling something of a pinch. Her insurance has got to be more expensive now, and she's not attempting anything as crowd-pleasing as the Leap for Life. This year's version of the carnival is not a recipe for big box office gains.

Even here in Hazzard, where love for vehicle tricks is long and memories are short, the stands are only half full.

"Those guys are pretty good," Luke says of the Jumping Jones Brothers, who aren't really brothers at all. Just a couple of really talented boys who do tandem stunts on their motorcycles. They were here last year, too, but Bo knows Luke didn't see their act back then.

"And now, for the grand finale," Diane proclaims over the PA system, tone too high and pinched to really convey drama, but she's doing what she can. She always sounded best when she dropped into her lower register and spoke straight into his ear, but she can't exactly evoke that same quality under the present circumstances. "The big moment you've all been waiting for."

Maybe Bo's just biased against her amplified voice. Before today, he'd only heard it once, and it's not a pleasant memory. The screech of steel protesting under the off-kilter weight it was trying to bear, smoke, pain, fear and in the middle of it all, Diane's words, accidentally picked up by the open microphone: _Is he all right?_

Like he can tell what Bo's thinking, Luke slings an arm around his shoulders. He's pointing down at a pair of ramps, as if that's the primary reason for touching him – to draw his attention toward the next stunt, instead of drawing it away from memories. Bo just smiles and plays along. Yes, he can see the set up for what appears to be the carnival's biggest stunt nowadays. One ramp (and he can remember the black and white stripes, the red arrow up the middle) near the edge of the track, and another mirroring it maybe half a football field away.

"'Daring' Darren Davidson will leap his bike from one side of the 'great gulf' to the other, while two trucks pass simultaneously underneath him!"

Bo can see them, now, a pair of panel trucks, one directly in front of where he and his cousins sit, the other across the width of the fairgrounds from them. A skinny girl in a tight costume carries a glowing torch into the middle of the fairgrounds and lights up a large hoop so that it becomes a ring of flame, then stands where she is and waves the torch in the air. Somewhere a gun goes off and everything starts to move at once – trucks from either side of the fairgrounds, a series of smaller motor bikes on their hind wheels doing flourishing loops and laps around the edges, and one big, black motorcycle with a red flame painted on the body starts rolling from the right, picking up speed. Just as it crests the ramp, the two trucks cross in the middle on either side of the flaming loop, somehow managing not to crush the girl still standing in the middle of it all, while the motorcycle lifts, flies through the ring of flame, and lands safely near the foot of the other ramp. More gunfire and a few small fireworks are set off while the girl takes a bow, marking the grand finale as successfully completed.

It is, Bo has to admit to himself, a pretty good stunt. Not as impressive as the Leap for Life, maybe, but it turns out that the Leap for Life was never successfully completed, so this might just be the best finale the carnival has ever pulled off. Even Luke is clapping while Daisy lets out hollers of approval.

"Thank you all for coming!" Diane's voice calls over the crowd noise. "If you'd like to meet any of the stunt guys, they'll all be at the west end, next to the lost and found, in about fifteen minutes!"

"And!" That's a different voice, but just as recognizable to Duke ears. Boss Hogg has grabbed hold of the microphone as he is wont to do at any public event. "Don't forget to stop by the hotdog stand and get yourself a hotdog, French fries, onion rings, hamburger…" there's a pause there and the crowd is on its feet, so Bo can't see the man, but he figures Boss had to stop to wipe drool from the corner of his mouth. Just mentioning food, and imagining the money that people will spend buying it, is enough to get him salivating, "And a jumbo Coke to top it off!"

Daisy's giggling and talking to the family that's been sitting behind them, explaining that the hotdogs aren't real beef, and the buns will cost them extra, when Luke turns to him.

"You want to go see her?" he asks quietly. Diane, he means.

Bo looks over the heads of the crowd to the corner where she was standing for the finale. He can't see much around the crowd now, just the fan of her hair when the wind picks up a little, the profile of her face. She is, as she always was, a beautiful woman.

It's what he came here to do. He had a bunch of questions for her, about what her life's been like for the past year, how she could have gone through show after show and never know one of her own employees was sabotaging the cars. Whether she ever actually loved him, how she could leave town the day after he was nearly killed, why she never checked to see if he was all right, never even sent a card. Maybe he thought the answers would mean something to him, but now that he's watched her run a successful carnival, he knows there's nothing she can say that will make any of what happened any better or worse. It'll just keep being what it is, like locusts decimating the crops – bad fortune, something to be risen above.

It's enough, he decides, that Luke came here with him today, that if he'd wanted to go spend time with Diane, Luke would have gone with him or let him go – whichever way Bo wanted it – even if his cousin wouldn't have liked it one bit.

"Nah," he decides. At least for today, it's enough to have family that loves him and will stick by him no matter what kind of trouble he gets himself into. "Let's go home." He throws an arm across Luke's shoulders and pats Daisy on the back so she'll quit making friends with their neighbors and join him and Luke as they descend out of the bleachers.

"And I'm driving," he announces. Luke just laughs and points forward into the sunshine, indicating a clear path through the crowd and down to the parking lot where the General Lee awaits.


End file.
